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JavaScript

Posted by Liam Maclachlan
Liam Maclachlan
22,805 Points

Can someone explain this regex for me?

It is a regex used in a jquery function on location.pathname.replace(/^\//,'')

What does it actually mean. Cheers :)

1 Answer

Daniel Newman
Daniel Newman
Courses Plus Student 10,715 Points

/ ^ assert position at start of the string \/ matches the character "/" literally /, Change it to '' nothing. In other words - erase / at the begging of the location.pathname string.

Daniel Newman
Daniel Newman
Courses Plus Student 10,715 Points

You can try it here: https://regex101.com/

Liam Maclachlan
Liam Maclachlan
22,805 Points

Ah. Now that is the part that was confusing me. So \/ is an opperator in itself or is it making sure that the / char is escaped? and the final; / is just depicting the end of the string?

So how does it know to turn that in to ''? Is this just how they work with anything after the comma or does that section also mean something in the redex?

I'm guessing this is part of the 'replace' function, not the regex... >.>

Daniel Newman
Daniel Newman
Courses Plus Student 10,715 Points

.replace() is a method of strings in JS. .replacet() take two parameters — regular expression inside /../ then "," which is separate arguments of any js method and the replacement part.

For example:

var name = "Sasha Grey an actress indeed";
var otherName = name.replace(/Sasha Grey/, "Peter Norton")

console.log(otherName); // Peter Norton an actress indeed

More about Regular Expression you can read here.

Liam Maclachlan
Liam Maclachlan
22,805 Points

Great resource man. Greatly appreciated (Y)