Unlike lookaheads, JavaScript doesn't support regex lookbehind syntax. That's unfortunate, but I'm not content with just resigning to that fact. Following are three ways I've come up with to mimic lookbehinds in JavaScript.
For those not familar with the concept of lookbehinds, they are zero-width assertions which, like the more specific \b, ^, and $ metacharacters, don't actually consume anything — they just match a position within text. This can be a very powerful concept. Read this first if you need more details.
Mimicking lookbehind with the replace method and optional capturing groupsThis first approach is not much like a real lookbehind, but it might be "good enough" in some simple cases. Here are a few examples:
// Mimic leading, positive lookbehind like replace(/(?<=es)t/g, 'x')
var output = 'testt'.replace(/(es)?t/g, function($0, $1){
return $1 ? $1 + 'x' : $0;
});
// output: tesxt
// Mimic leading, negative lookbehind like replace(/(?<!es)t/g, 'x')
var output = 'testt'.replace(/(es)?t/g, function($0, $1){
return $1 ? $0 : 'x';
});
// output: xestx
// Mimic inner, positive lookbehind like replace(/\w(?<=s)t/g, 'x')
var output = 'testt'.replace(/(?:(s)|\w)t/g, function($0, $1){
终于看到熊猫的大作了。