Parsing Phrases with a Pipe Character Using JavaScript

Question

I've been working on my Safari extension for saving content to Instapaper and have been working on enhancing my title parsing for bookmarks. For example, an article that I recently saved has a tag that looks like this:

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I want to use the JavaScript in my Safari extension to remove all of the text after the pipe character so that I can make the final bookmark look neater once it is saved to Instapaper.

I've attempted the title parsing successfully in a couple of similar cases using blocks of code that look like this:

if(safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title.search(' - ') != -1) {
            console.log(safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title);
            console.log(safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title.search(' - '));
            var parsedTitle = safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title.substring(0, safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title.search(' - '));
            console.log(parsedTitle);
};

I started getting thrown for a loop once I tried doing this same thing with the pipe character; however, since JavaScript uses it as a special character. I've tried several bits of code to try and solve this problem. The most recent looks like this (attempting to use regular expressions and escape the pipe character):

if(safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title.search('/\|') != -1) {
            console.log(safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title);
            console.log(safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title.search('/\|'));
            var parsedTitle = safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title.substring(0, safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title.search('/\|'));
            console.log(parsedTitle);
};

If anybody could give me a tip that works for this, your help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Your regex is malformed. It should be:

safari.application.activeBrowserWindow.activeTab.title.search(/\|/)

Note the lack of quotes; I'm using a regex literal here. Also, regex literals need to be bound by /.

Instead of searching and then replacing, you can simply do a replace with the following regex:

str = str.replace(/\|.*$/, "");

This will remove everything after the | character if it exists.