<div>
Hmm, that was interesting<br />

<pre><code id="code-34495">&lt;div id=&quot;x&quot;&gt;
&amp;bull; Bullet&lt;br&gt;
&amp;bull; Bullet&lt;br&gt;
&amp;bull; Bullet&lt;br&gt;
&amp;bull; Bullet&lt;br&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;div id=&quot;y&quot; style=&quot;display:none&quot;&gt;&amp;bull;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;script&gt;
var s = document.getElementById('x').innerHTML;
var bull = document.getElementById('y').innerHTML;
var re = eval('/'+bull+'/g')
var s=s.replace(re,'&amp;copy;');
document.getElementById('x').innerHTML=s;
&lt;/script&gt;
</code></pre>
</div>


Hmm, that was interesting


<div id="x">
&bull; Bullet<br>
&bull; Bullet<br>
&bull; Bullet<br>
&bull; Bullet<br>
</div>
<div id="y" style="display:none">&bull;</div>
<script>
var s = document.getElementById('x').innerHTML;
var bull = document.getElementById('y').innerHTML;
var re = eval('/'+bull+'/g')
var s=s.replace(re,'&copy;');
document.getElementById('x').innerHTML=s;
</script>


<div>
<div class="content wysiwyg-content">
I'm trying to use a regular expression on a snippet of HTML that contains &amp;bull; (ampersand then 'bull;').<br />
<br />
I'm getting the HTML by doing:<br />
<br />
var s=document.body.innerHTML;<wbr /><br />
<br />
but this returns the HTML as parsed into a DOM and the special characters - prefixed with ampersands - don't seem to be prefixed with ampersands anymore once the DOM has been created. &nbsp;So just doing:<br />
<br />
var arr=s.match(/&amp;bull;/);<br />
<br />
won't return anything.
</div>
</div>


I'm trying to use a regular expression on a snippet of HTML that contains &bull; (ampersand then 'bull;').

I'm getting the HTML by doing:

var s=document.body.innerHTML;

but this returns the HTML as parsed into a DOM and the special characters - prefixed with ampersands - don't seem to be prefixed with ampersands anymore once the DOM has been created.  So just doing:

var arr=s.match(/&bull;/);

won't return anything.

How to match special HTML characters using reg ex in JavaScript?

JavaScript is a dynamic, object-based language commonly used for client-side scripting in web browsers. Recently, server side JavaScript frameworks have also emerged. JavaScript runs on nearly every operating system and  in almost every mainstream web browser.

JavaScript

A regular expression ("regex") is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or string matching, i.e. "find and replace"-like operations. Regular expression processors are found in several search engines, search and replace dialogs of several word processors and text editors, and in the command lines of text processing utilities, such as sed and AWK. Many programming languages provide regular expression capabilities, some built-in, for example Perl, JavaScript, Ruby, AWK, and Tcl, and others via a standard library, for example .NET languages, Java, Python and C++ (since C++11). Most other languages offer regular expressions via a library.