Stripping css with regex?

It depends on where you're going to use the RegEx. What language, what program etc. From what I understand you want to erase the .icon-, keep the icon name, then erase the rest?

Here's a (minimalistic) regex that can be used in Notepad++ to find & replace the way you want it:

Find what: \.icon-|:before \{\r\n.+\r\n\}

Replace With:

Output:

download
upload
inbox
play-circle

".icon-download:before { content: \"\f01a\";}".replace(/\.icon\-(.*?):before {.*?}/, "$1")

I don't write Javascript code, but the code above seems to work and might give you some hint. Note that you have to escape the double quotes in the original string. The specific technique you are looking for is back-reference.

I got the inspiration from this post.

You say you'd like to build an array. There is thus no need to replace or erase. Simply extract the icon names.

In php you could do it like this :

$css = readfile( ... ); // get css as a string
preg_match_all ('/icon-([-a-z]+):/', $css, $matches);
$result = $matches[1];

You definitely would like to read the regex documentation in the php manual : http://www.php.net/manual/fr/book.pcre.php. It is complete and easy to follow.

Simplest form I quickly came up with off the top of my head in JavaScript.

    // add more matches here
var pattern = /(\.icon\-(download|inbox|play\-circle))/g;

var m;

var text = '.icon-download:before {'+
                'content: "\f01a";'+
        '}'+
        '.icon-upload:before {'+
        '  content: "\f01b";'+
        '}'+
        '.icon-inbox:before {'+
        '  content: "\f01c";'+
        '}'+
        '.icon-play-circle:before {'+
        '  content: "\f01d";'+
        '}';

var reg = new RegExp(pattern);

while((m = reg.exec(text)) != null){
   alert(m[0]); 
}

/.icon-([a-z-]*):before {[^\}]*}/gm

Using this pattern you can iterate through all icon names in your CSS files. By modifying the [a-z-] part you can define the character that those name can contain. In my example I went with a to z and dashes (-).

An example with Java code:

public static ArrayList<String> parseIconNames(String css) {
    ArrayList<String> names = new ArrayList<String>();

    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(".icon-([a-z-]*):before {[^\\}]*}", Pattern.MULTILINE);
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(css);

    while(matcher.find()) {
        names.add(matcher.group(1));
    }

    return names;
}