Would it be possible to change this:

Hello, this is Mike [example]

to this:

Hello, this is Mike

Using JS + Regex? Thank you.

Would it be possible to change this:

Hello, this is Mike [example]

to this:

Hello, this is Mike

Using JS + Regex? Thank you.

• javascript
• regex

4 Answers 4

If you prefer doing this using a regular expression, consider the following.

var r = 'Hello, this is Mike [example]'.replace(/ *\[[^\]]*]/, '');
console.log(r); //=> "Hello, this is Mike"

If your data contains more text in brackets you want removed, use the g (global) modifier.

Based off your given string, you could just use split here.

var r = 'Hello, this is Mike [example]'.split(' [')[0]
console.log(r); //=> "Hello, this is Mike"

My first thought would be:

"Hello, this is Mike [example]".replace(/(\[.+\])/g, '');

JS Fiddle demo.

Or, as noted in the comments:

"Hello, this is Mike [example]".replace(/(\[.*?\])/g, '');

JS Fiddle demo.

References:

• JavaScript Regular Expressions.

Removal of the whitespace is not always desirable, e.g. when the brackets are used for some types of markup. Replace with a single space.

text = "This is a [big]large[/big] bear."
text = text.replace(/\s*\[.*?\]\s*/g, ' ')

result: text="This is a large bear."

This example shows removing '<' & '>', escaping using a text node function, removing divs and their content and finally removing '[' & ']'.

For a complete list of escape characters see:mateam.net

function escapeHTML(html) {
  return document.createElement('div').appendChild(document.createTextNode(html)).parentNode.innerHTML;
}

var a = document.createElement('div');
a.id = 'test';
a.innerHTML = 'test';
document.body.appendChild(a);
a.onclick = function(){

var str = '<a href="ggoggle.ca">ggogle</a> wish i was here <img src="image"><div>another div</div> [square brackets] <div>yet another div</div>';

console.log('\n original string:\n'+str);

str = str.replace(/\<div\>.*?\<\/div\>/g,'');

console.log('\n removed divs & content:\n'+str);
// <a href="ggoggle.ca">ggogle</a> wish i was here <img src="image"> [square brackets]

var str = escapeHTML(str);

console.log('\n escape using text node - escapeHTML(html):\n'+str);
// &lt;a href="ggoggle.ca"&gt;ggogle&lt;/a&gt; wish i was here &lt;img src="image"&gt; [square brackets]

str = str.replace(/\<.*?\>/g,'').replace(/\&lt;.*?\&gt;/g,'');
    
console.log('\n removed \'< >\' and escaped (&lt; &gt;) and content:\n'+str);
// ggogle wish i was here  [square brackets] 

str = str.replace(/\[.*?\]/g,'')

console.log('\n remove square brackets and their content:\n'+str);
// ggogle wish i was here


}