Hello, I have a regex made to match markdown links...

# javascript

[louiscad]

Hello, I have a regex made to match markdown links that works perfectly in Kotlin/JVM, but in JavaScript, it leads to a runtime error:

SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: /\[(?<text>.+)\]\((?<url>[^) ]+)(?: \"(?<title>.+)\")?\)/: Invalid escape
    at new RegExp (<anonymous>)

Here's the source code that works in the JVM and fails in Chrome :

//language=RegExp
val linksRegex = """\[(?<text>.+)\]\((?<url>[^) ]+)(?: \"(?<title>.+)\")?\)""".toRegex()

When I look at the generated JavaScript code, here's what I get:

var tmp0_toRegex_0 = '\\[(?<text>.+)\\]\\((?<url>[^) ]+)(?: \\"(?<title>.+)\\")?\\)';

I tried to workaround using js("…") :

val linksRegex = js("""'\[(?<text>.+)]\((?<url>[^) ]+)(?: "(?<title>.+)")?\)'""").unsafeCast<String>().toRegex()

Unfortunately, it then seems to strip the backslashes away as it's matching quite random strings that are not markdown-style links at all but plain English sentences.

Is there a way to get that Regex to work in JS like it does in the JVM?

[ephemient]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions JS RegExp is a different language than Java Pattern, and Kotlin's Regex just delegates to the platform

[ephemient]

in this case though, I don't see why you're trying to escape ", it's not a special character

[Robert Jaros]

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-46694

[Robert Jaros]

This should work fine on both JVM and JS:
"""\[(?<text>.+)\]\((?<url>[^) ]+)(?: "(?<title>.+)")?\)"""

[louiscad]

Thank you very much for the help, the escapes of the double quotes were the culprit as you found, and I didn't notice because the unneeded escapes were ignored on the JVM.