One bug though.

The result of “(1(ab)2(cd)3)” must be the input string itself. But your second pattern yields [(ab), 1(cd)2].

Thanks for sharing.

However, this trick could indeed be used for some nested HTML handling. Let’s say you wanted to remove all div tags and their contents, accounting for nested and self-closed divs. (And for some reason you didn’t want to use the DOM to help.)

while (str != (str = str.replace(/<div\b[^>]*?\/>|<div\b[^>]*>(?:(?!<div\b[^>]*>|<\/div>)[\S\s])*<\/div>/gi, “”)));

Done.

> how would it be fixed to handle things like that which collide with the
> regex interpretation? Is there an easy way to escape the delimiters?

Here you go:

function escapeRegExp (str) {
    return str.replace(/[-[\]{}()*+?.\\^$|,]/g, “\\$&”);
}

My XRegExp library provides something like this as XRegExp.escape, except that it also escapes “#” and whitespace because of its support for free-spacing/extended mode.

// Parameters:
// ld – left delimiter
// rd – right delimiter
// str – string to be stripped

Problem: I’m not a regex hero, so while it works with braces and angle brackets, it fails on parentheses. So how would it be fixed to handle things like that which collide with the regex interpretation? Is there an easy way to escape the delimiters?


//Function: killTags
// Removes nested tags
//
// Parameters:
// ld - left delimiter (for example: )
// str - string to be stripped
//
// Returns:
// str - stripped string
function killTags(ld,rd,str) {
while (str!=(str=str.replace(new RegExp(ld+"[^"+ld+rd+"]*"+rd),"g")));
return str;
};