I'm trying to write a regex (for JavaScript's regex engine) that I can use to do a find and replace in text for emoji names within colons. Like in Slack or Discord when you type :smiley-face:
and it replaces it when you submit the chat. I'm targeting text nodes only so I don't need to worry about other html inside the text.
Is it possible to write a regex that could match all of the following rules? (text highlighted with monospace blocks = regex positive matches)
:any-non-whitespace:
:text1:
sample2:
:@(1@#$@SD:
:s:
:nospace::inbetween:
because there are 2 colons in the middle
:nospace:
middle:nospace:
I'm starting with something like this but it's incomplete
/:(?!:)\S+:/gim
I'm trying to think of all the special cases that might possibly occur doing this. Maybe I'm overthinking it.
There's a lot of Twitch emotes involved so I can't use emoji unicode characters. The regex will find matches and replace with tags
I suggest using
:[^:\s]*(?:::[^:\s]*)*:
See the regex demo. It is the same pattern as :(?:[^:\s]|::)*:
, but a bit more efficient because the (?:..|...)*
part is unrolled.
Details
:
- a colon
[^:\s]*
- 0+ chars other than :
and whitespace
(?:
- start of a quantified non-capturing group:
::
- double colon
[^:\s]*
- 0+ chars other than :
and whitespace
)*
- end of grouping, repeated 0 or more times (due to the *
quantifier)
:
- a colon.
Do you want something like this regex?
(:(?![\n])[()#$@-\w]+:)
Demo,,, in which you can additionally insert unallowed characters
into the character class of the (?![\n])
and also additonally insert allowed characters
into the character class [()#$@-\w]
My first thought was
:(::|[^:\n])+:
It matches a string, at least one character long, including surrounding colons, that consists of either
- two colons (
::
), or
- a character that isn't a colon, nor a line feed.
But that's basically what Wiktor had as a (slower) alternative (comments). But I'll leave it here anyway since it's working, as opposed to the other submitted answers ;)
See it here at regex101.
Try this regx
/(^|\s)+:([^\s\n\r])+:|^:[^\s\n\r]+/g