Simple Nodejs Regex: Extract text from between two strings

Question

Simple Nodejs Regex: Extract text from between two strings

I'm trying to extract the Vine ID from the following URL:

https://vine.co/v/Mipm1LMKVqJ/embed

I'm using this regex:

/v/(.*)/

and testing it here: http://regexpal.com/

...but it's matching the V and closing "/". How can I just get "Mipm1LMKVqJ", and what would be the cleanest way to do this in Node?

javascript
regex
node.js

Answer 1

You need to reference the first match group in order to print the match result only.

var re = new RegExp('/v/(.*)/');
var r  = 'https://vine.co/v/Mipm1LMKVqJ/embed'.match(re);
if (r)
    console.log(r[1]); //=> "Mipm1LMKVqJ"

Note: If the url often change, I recommend using *? to prevent greediness in your match.

Although from the following url, maybe consider splitting.

var r = 'https://vine.co/v/Mipm1LMKVqJ/embed'.split('/')[4]
console.log(r); //=> "Mipm1LMKVqJ"

Answer 2

You don't want regexp for this at all

The url module is what you want

var url = require("url");

url.parse("https://vine.co/v/Mipm1LMKVqJ/embed");

Output

{ protocol: 'https:',
  slashes: true,
  auth: null,
  host: 'vine.co',
  port: null,
  hostname: 'vine.co',
  hash: null,
  search: null,
  query: null,
  pathname: '/v/Mipm1LMKVqJ/embed',
  path: '/v/Mipm1LMKVqJ/embed',
  href: 'https://vine.co/v/Mipm1LMKVqJ/embed' }

If you want more hand-holding

url.parse("https://vine.co/v/Mipm1LMKVqJ/embed").path.split("/")[2];
// "Mipm1LMKVqJ"