Replace any words with modified version of themselves

Question

I\'m looking for an easy way to turn this string:

(java || javascript) && vbscript

Into this string:

(str.search(\'java         


        

Answer 1

Just a fixed version with correct capture and using 1 as backtrack index. See details in "Specifying a string as a parameter" section of String.replace.

mystring.replace(/([-\w]+)/g, "str.search('$1')");

Answer 2

You can call replace:

mystring.replace(/[-\w]+/g, "str.search('$&')");

Note that this is an XSS hole, since the user input can contain 's.