Referencing nested groups in JavaScript using string replace using regex

Question

Because of the way that jQuery deals with script tags, I've found it necessary to do some HTML manipulation using regular expressions (yes, I know... not the ideal tool for the job). Unfortunately, it seems like my understanding of how captured groups work in JavaScript is flawed, because when I try this:

var scriptTagFormat = /<script .*?(src="(.*?)")?.*?>(.*?)<\/script>/ig;

html = html.replace(
    scriptTagFormat, 
    '<span class="script-placeholder" style="display:none;" title="$2">$3</span>');

The script tags get replaced with the spans, but the resulting title attribute is blank. Shouldn't $2 match the content of the src attribute of a script tag?

Answer 1

Nesting of groups is irrelevant; their numbering is determined strictly by the positions of their opening parentheses within the regex. In your case, that means it's group #1 that captures the whole src="value" sequence, and group #2 that captures just the value part.