Why does the Regex not get applied to the final output?

Question

I am trying to apply some regex to some text that is gathered with the Dataview plugin for the note program Obsidian.

I am using the dataview plugin to take some text from multiple notes and copying it as plain text, then I am taking that text and formatting it with regex. The issue I have is that the final output does not get formatted right and I do not know why.

Output example

The output is supposed to only have "- example" without the duplicate text and the brackets

const inputSentences = [
"- [[Note example 3.md|Note example 3]]",
"- [[Note example 2.md|Note example 2]]",
"- [[Note example 1.md|Note example 1]]"
]


function transformSentence(input) {
  if (typeof input !== 'string') {
    // Handle non-string input, e.g., return input as is or throw an error
    return input;
  }
  const regex = /-\s*\[\[([^|]+)\|[^]]+\]\]/g;
  return input.replace(regex, '- $1');
}

inputSentences.forEach(inputSentence => {
  const outputSentence = transformSentence(inputSentence);
  console.log(outputSentence);
})

Answer 1

You forgot to escape ] in your character set:

/-\s*\[\[([^|]+)\|[^\]]+\]\]/g
                    ^

It seems different regex flavors interpret [^]] differently. In JavaScript, this is interpreted as \^\] (^ literal followed by a ]), but in other flavors/languages like python or PCRE, it is interpreted as [^\]] (any character other than ]). It's better to escape characters like [, ] or - within character sets manually to avoid ambiguities.

Using mplungjan's minimal reproducible example:

const inputSentences = [
"- [[Note example 3.md|Note example 3]]",
"- [[Note example 2.md|Note example 2]]",
"- [[Note example 1.md|Note example 1]]"
]


function transformSentence(input) {
  if (typeof input !== 'string') {
    // Handle non-string input, e.g., return input as is or throw an error
    return input;
  }
  const regex = /-\s*\[\[([^|]+)\|[^\]]+\]\]/g;
  return input.replace(regex, '- $1');
}

inputSentences.forEach(inputSentence => {
  const outputSentence = transformSentence(inputSentence);
  console.log(outputSentence);
})