Remove prefix with unknown characters in JavaScript

Question

I have a web page that the title is changed from 'Pagename' to '(1) Pagename' when there is an update on the page. That number increments to 50 each time there is a new update and then is maxed out showing '(50+) Timeline'.

When logging page views, Google Analytics shows the '(n) Pagename', which I don't want. So I found out how to manually change to logged page title, _gaq.push(["_set", "title", 'new title']);.

So my question is, how do I most efficiently remove the (1-50)/(50+) prefix and just get 'Pagename'? Is regex best for this?

This is what I'm using based on the answer from Ross:

var window_title = window.title.replace(/^\(\d+\+?\)\s/, '');
_gaq.push(["_set", "title", window_title]);

Ross McLellan · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-14 00:50:17Z

2

Yes, RegEx can do that.

window.title.replace(/^\(\d+\+?\)\s/, '');

Of course it depends on what software your site is using as perhaps it would be possible to just output the page title without that prefix in the relevant part of the template. So echoing that directly into the Google Analytics tag. But I think the above javascript is probably the easier solution to implement.

answered Nov 14, 2012 at 0:50

Ross McLellan

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3 Comments

Justin Over a year ago

I'd like to check if the prefix exists, then if it does, manually set it without the prefix. So something like

if(prefix_exists_in_title){ var new_title = window.title.replace(/^\(\d+\+?\)\s/, ''); _gaq.push(["_set", "title", new_title]); }

How would I get the True/False for the if statement?

Stephen P Over a year ago

@Justin - there's really no point in doing the test first; you'd be doing a match followed by a match+replace for the True case which is more expensive than just blindly applying the regex. It would be worth it if you had a large block of code to execute when matched. That said, you can do mystring.match(myregex) which returns an array of the match(es), or null on no match.

Justin Over a year ago

Well said. Thanks for your help.

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