How can I extract text from the middle of a string with Javascript?

Question

I have these strings:

baseUrl = "http://www.example.com"
baseUrl = "https://secure.example-server.com:443"

Can someone tell me how I can extract the server information from baseUrl so I can get either "example" and "example-server"

Answer 1

You can use regex:

baseUrl.match(/\.(.*?)\.co/i)[1];

Regex Explanation

1. /: Delimiters of regex
2. \.: Matches . literal(need to be escaped)
3. (): Capturing group
4. .*?: Match any string
5. co: Matches string co
6. i: Match in-case-sensitive
7. [1]: Get the capturing group

Regex Visualization

Answer 2

You can split strings at certain chars with split("."); (see http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_split.asp) then you can compare the results to your predefined words.

or you take the 2nd element of the results which would usually(?) be what you are looking for.

Answer 3

Take a look to this free library: http://medialize.github.io/URI.js/.