back to the lesson

Find bbtag pairs

A “bb-tag” looks like [tag]...[/tag], where tag is one of: b, url or quote.

For instance:

[b]text[/b]
[url]http://google.com[/url]

BB-tags can be nested. But a tag can’t be nested into itself, for instance:

Normal:
[url] [b]http://google.com[/b] [/url]
[quote] [b]text[/b] [/quote]

Can't happen:
[b][b]text[/b][/b]

Tags can contain line breaks, that’s normal:

[quote]
  [b]text[/b]
[/quote]

Create a regexp to find all BB-tags with their contents.

For instance:

let regexp = /your regexp/flags;

let str = "..[url]http://google.com[/url]..";
alert( str.match(regexp) ); // [url]http://google.com[/url]

If tags are nested, then we need the outer tag (if we want we can continue the search in its content):

let regexp = /your regexp/flags;

let str = "..[url][b]http://google.com[/b][/url]..";
alert( str.match(regexp) ); // [url][b]http://google.com[/b][/url]

Opening tag is \[(b|url|quote)].

Then to find everything till the closing tag – let’s use the pattern .*? with flag s to match any character including the newline and then add a backreference to the closing tag.

The full pattern: \[(b|url|quote)\].*?\[/\1].

In action:

let regexp = /\[(b|url|quote)].*?\[\/\1]/gs;

let str = `
  [b]hello![/b]
  [quote]
    [url]http://google.com[/url]
  [/quote]
`;

alert( str.match(regexp) ); // [b]hello![/b],[quote][url]http://google.com[/url][/quote]

Please note that besides escaping [, we had to escape a slash for the closing tag [\/\1], because normally the slash closes the pattern.