Whitespace and regex

[toneDigital]

Hi all,

I have a text file that needs to be parsed correctly. The text file looks like this:

[header]
   [header 2]
   [ header3 ] 

I can grab these headers by doing so:

var expression:RegExp = /[ [a-z0-9 ]+ ]/igxm;
var items:Array = text.match(expression);


But I would also like to remove the white space from before and after the brackets, so the headers can align against the left edge. Also, for [ header3 ], I would like to remove the white space inside the brackets, before "h" and after "3". What would be the correct regex for something this? Thanks in advance.

tone

[nunomira]

Hi,

Search for "[ " and " ]" and replace these whith "[" and "]" respectively?

[toneDigital]

yes

[5Five555]

I think you need 2 RegExps to do this, this is what I came up with

var s:String = //Assume s holds the contents of the entire text file
s = s.replace (/\s*\[\s*/g, "[");
s = s.replace (/\s*\]\s*/g, "]"); 

If you don't understand the expressions I'll break it down.
\s is a metasequence that matches any whitespace - space, carriage returns, line feeds, etc
* means match the previous item zero or more times
\[ means match "[", you need the slash because [ is a metacharacter
g means match this expression through the entire string

So the first expression says match all white spaces before and after every "[" and replace them with just "[". Second is the same thing but with "]".

This results in

[header][header 2][header3] 

So you can split this string into an array using [ or ] as the delimiter.

PS: I love expressions, I think they're so cool.