Matching invisible characters in JavaScript RegEx

Question

I've got some string that contain invisible characters, but they are in somewhat predictable places. Typically the surround the piece of text I want to extract, and then after the 2nd occurrence I want to keep the rest of the text.

I can't seem to figure out how to both key off of the invisible characters, and exclude them from my result. To match invisibles I've been using this regex: /\xA0\x00-\x09\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F/ which does seem to work.

Here's an example: [invisibles]Keep as match 1[invisibles]Keep as match 2

Here's what I've been using so far without success:

/([\xA0\x00-\x09\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F]+)(.+)([\xA0\x00-\x09\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F]+)/(.+)

I've got the capture groups in there, but it's bee a while since I've had to use regex's in this way, so I know I'm missing something important. I was hoping to just make the invisible matches non-capturing groups, but it seems that JavaScript does not support this.

Answer 1

Something like this seems like what you want. The second regex you have pretty much works, but the / is in totally the wrong place. Perhaps you weren't properly reading out the group data.

var s = "\x0EKeep as match 1\x0EKeep as match 2";
var r = /[\xA0\x00-\x09\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F]+(.+)[\xA0\x00-\x09\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F]+(.+)/;

var match = s.match(r);

var part1 = match[1];
var part2 = match[2];