I need to convert a string like this:

tag, tag2, longer tag, tag3

to:

tag, tag2, longer-tag, tag3

To make this short, I need to replace spaces not preceded by mas with hyphens, and I need to do this in Javascript.

I need to convert a string like this:

tag, tag2, longer tag, tag3

to:

tag, tag2, longer-tag, tag3

To make this short, I need to replace spaces not preceded by mas with hyphens, and I need to do this in Javascript.

• javascript
• regex

7 Answers 7

I think this should work

var re = new RegExp("([^,\s])\s+" "g");
var result = tagString.replace(re, "$1-");

Edit: Updated after Blixt's observation.

mystring.replace(/([^,])\s+/i "$1-"); There's a better way to do it, but I can't ever remember the syntax

[^,] = Not a ma

Edit Sorry, didn't notice the replace before. I've now updated my answer:

var exp = new RegExp("([^,]) ");
tags = tags.replace(exp, "$1-");

text.replace(/([^,]) /, '$1-');

Unfortunately, Javascript doesn't seem to support negative lookbehinds, so you have to use something like this (modified from here):

var output = 'tag, tag2, longer tag, tag3'.replace(/(,)?t/g, function($0, $1){
    return $1 ? $0 : '-';
});

[^,] - The first character is not ma, the second character is space and it searches for that kind of string

([a-zA-Z] ){1,}

Maybe? Not tested. something like that.