Searching for code inside function using Javascript

Question

I have an html page with small javascript function embedded inside script tags. I am writing another javascript/jquery function inside the same page to load this page as text in a variable and search for the code inside the smaller javascript function.

DEMO

Example: This is my file: abc.html. The search should ideally return alert(element).

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <body>
    <button id="btn-get">$.get()</button>
    <script data-require="jquery" data-semver="2.0.3" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">         
        function getValue(element)
        {
            alert(element);
            //end
        }

        var content, matched;
        $('#btn-get').click(function(e) 
        {
            $.get('abc.html', function(data) 
            {
            content = data;
            });
            matched = String(content).match("getValue(.*)end"); 
            console.log(matched);
      });
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

This returns (.*) from the search query, which is not what I want. I have tried the suggestions in the following SO posts:

Regex get all content between two characters

Find string between two strings in Javascript or jQuery

regex search a string for contents between two strings

They return null value. I tried using split, pop as well. Nothing works for this case. Can this be done? What would be the best way to get the correct output? Thanks in advance!

@atmd data is the content of the file abc.html, which is basically the entire code from <!DOCTYPE....</html> as a string. — GobSmack
– GobSmack, Commented Jun 4, 2015 at 19:14
@isherwood I need the search to return the code inside the function getValue which alert(element); in this case. — GobSmack
– GobSmack, Commented Jun 4, 2015 at 19:15
not being able to see what is being searched through make it hard to say why that search isnt working — atmd
– atmd, Commented Jun 4, 2015 at 19:16

GobSmack · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-15 17:55:35Z

I figured out a much obvious and simpler way to do this thanks to SO.

Since every tag in html can be assigned an id, I simply created a separate script out of the getValue function and assigned it an id and then used $("#id).html() to access its contents.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <body>
    <button id="btn-get">$.get()</button>
    <script data-require="jquery" data-semver="2.0.3" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.min.js"></script>
    <script id="getvalue" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">         
        function getValue(element)
        {
            alert(element);
            //end
        }
   </script>
   <script>
        var content, matched;
        $('#btn-get').click(function(e) 
        {
            var temp = $('#getvalue').html();
            console.log(temp.substring(temp.indexOf('{')+1,temp.lastIndexOf('}')));
      });
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

James Newton · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-04 19:50:50Z

0

This regex does what you ask, in this particular case:

/{\s*([\s\S]*?)\s*}/

However, it will not produce the results you want if the small javascript function contains a statement which contains its own curly brackets, such as an if () {} statement.

Why do you need to do this? There is a chance that there is a much better way of achieving the same result without parsing the HTML text for a function.

TEST

edited Jun 4, 2015 at 19:50

answered Jun 4, 2015 at 19:44

James Newton

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1 Comment

GobSmack Over a year ago

This works well! Thanks! I also had to add the g at the end to extract all match occurrences: /{\s*([\s\S]*?)\s*}/g .

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