Hi,

I am struggling to write a regular expression that would extract the
survey ID from a string and would appreciate if someone could help me to fix it.

I need to extract the "span_spr08_arg" text and assign it to a variable.

payload = '<SurveyReference>span_spr08_arg</SurveyReference>'

That is what I have tried but to no avail:

SurveyID = payload.replace(/<SurveyReference>([^<]+)/,"$1")

but this is what I am getting : span_spr08_arg</SurveyReference>

Please note that I could load the string into a DOM object and extract the id but I do not want to use the DOM.

Cheers

Claudio

Well you didn't match the end tag so your replace is working as it should, just replacing what you found. Try: (You'll have to check if \/ is the correct way to escape a / character within a regex.)

I think there are a few simpler ways of finding the ID though.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the reply.

I had to make some changes for that to work with the whole string:

SurveyID = payload.replace(/[^~]+<SurveyReference>([\w]+)<\/SurveyReference>[^~]+/g,"$1")

This seems to be working now but it looks ugly.

payload = "<xmlParams>
  <RecordLabel>
    <SearchString>car</SearchString>
    <SurveyReference>span_spr08_arg</SurveyReference>
    <RecordID>S17776524</RecordID>
    <RecordType>A</RecordType>
<UserCookie>E51364468F23529BCEB8147876487E289B9275 C7866924BC57D8257D4595BB1C37859290FE76D74CD82A9055 03CE19D8AFC11644290B36E4BBAA1C51631F2A54D1B5718B20 38696EDE496136DB3D57E9A1C3848FF22AF8F327075D0CDD85 0345BB44DC8B6A43CAD30604F8DD5A4477E0</UserCookie>
</RecordLabel>
</xmlParams>"

You should have said that wasn't the whole text. You can use .+ (one or more of anything) instead of [^~]+ (anything except a tilde).

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

Thanks