I have the following string:
var originalStr = "Test example <firstTag>text inside first tag</firstTag>, <secondTag>50</secondTag> end."
What's the best way to identify all tags, the correspondent tag name and their content? This is the kind of result I'm looking for.
var tagsFound =
[ { "tagName": "firstTag", "value": "text inside first tag" }
, { "tagName": "secondTag", "value": "50" }
]
HTML is very complicated to parse, so the best approach is to use a parser that already exists.
If you're doing this in a browser, you can use the one built into the browser: DOMParser.
If you're doing this in Node.js, there are several libraries to do it, such as jsdom. It provides an API almost identical to the one in web browsers.
Here's a jsdom example:
const dom = new JSDOM("<!doctype html>" + originalStr);
const doc = dom.window.document;
for (const childElement of doc.body.children) {
console.log(`${childElement.tagName} - ${childElement.textContent}`);
}
With your string, that would output:
FIRSTTAG - text inside first tag
SECONDTAG - 50
You'd write code using the DOM methods provided to create the output you're looking for. (Note the tag name normalization above; you may have to use nodeLocation to get the original capitalization if it matters to what you're doing.)
Depending on complexity of strings you dealing with - the simple regEx solution might work (it works for your string nicely:
var str = 'Test example <firstTag>text inside first tag</firstTag>, <secondTag>50</secondTag> end.';
var tagsFound = [];
str.replace(/<([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_-]*)\b[^>]*>(.*?)<\/\1>/g, function(m,m1,m2){
// write data to result objcect
tagsFound.push({
"tagName": m1,
"value": m2
})
// replace with original = do nothing with string
return m;
});
// Displaying the results
for(var i=0;i<tagsFound.length; i++){
console.log(tagsFound[i]);
}There will be a problem when self closing tags or tags containing other tags are taken into accont. Like <selfClosedTag/> or <tag><tag>something</tag>else</tag>
