[RESOLVED] Removing BBcode

ClarkF1

Hi,

I'm trying to get an option to remove BBcode in a textarea like what they have here (the button with the big red X when you post) e.g.

[/ quote] [font= ][/font ] etc.

I've managed to read the contents of the textarea into a function and I've tried a few regex's but nothing seems to work.

Most of the regexs I've tried are to get the contents of the [] tags but I want to remove the content and the [] tags themselves.

Any ideas???

NogDog

The regex would be something like:

/\[[^\]]*\]/

(Is that the ugliest thing you've ever seen in so few characters, or what? 😉 )

ClarkF1

That's damn fugly 😉

I tried it without success.

The bbcode I tried it on was

[quote ]hello[/quote ]

The Javascript function is:

function removeBBcode(areaId)
{
var txtArea = document.getElementById( areaId );
pattern = new RegExp ("/\[[^\]]*\]/");
document.getElementById(areaId).value = document.getElementById(areaId ).value.replace(pattern,"");

if (document.getElementById( areaId ).value.match(pattern))
alert("Success");
else
alert("Failure");
}

I added some extra debug stuff and it comes up with the failure alert

NogDog

Two things: I forgot you need a "g" modifier at the end of the regex to make it global, plus you do not need to quote the pattern. So this little script worked OK for me:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang='en'>
<head>
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1'>
<title>Untitled</title>
<script type="text/javascript">
function removeBBcode(areaId)
{
   var text1 = new String("[quote]hello[/quote]");
   var pattern = new RegExp(/\[[^\]]*\]/g);
   var text2 = new String(text1.replace(pattern,""));
   alert('Before: '+text1);
   alert('After: '+text2);
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="removeBBcode('foobar');">

</body>
</html>

ClarkF1

It was probably the damn quotes.......

Many many thanks........

I bow to your superior knowledge 😃

NogDog

Don't know about "superior"...It's more a matter of curiosity and stubbornness. 🙂