Replace all instances of a pattern with regular expressions in Javascript / jQuery

Question

First off I don\'t know much about regex and need to buy a book because it\'s has proven to me to be difficult to pickup.

Ultimately I want to take a dom element, an

Answer 1

.replace(/\[([^\]]*)\]/g, link + "$1</a>")

which means, find text between [ and ] and replace it with the value of link, the text itself and ''. This ensures matching square brackets. The 'g' means 'do it multiple times (globally)'.

Answer 2

This will loop through an entire string and replace it with your chosen word or phrase with another. (kind of complicated but it works and is very reusable)

var string = "this is some test text. You can replace all instances of any word/phrase within this text"

var new string = string.findAndReplace("text", "BOO!");

Object.prototype.findAndReplace = function( searchText, replace ) {
    var matchCount = 0;
        var text = this;

        for( var i = 0; i<text.length; i++ ) {
            var textSearched = "";

            for(var x = 0; x<searchText.length; x++) {
                var currentText = text[i+x];

                if( currentText != undefined ) {
                    textSearched += currentText;
                }
            }

            if( textSearched == searchText ) {
                matchCount++;
            }

            console.log( textSearched );
        }

        for(var i=0; i<matchCount; i++) {
            text = text.replace( searchText, replace );
        }

        return text;
    }