What is replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/ig," ") doing?

Question

I have come across come code written by another developer and I can not working out what it is doing:

title.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/ig," ")

Answer 1

It replaces all tags (substrings on the form <...>) with a space, " ".

Here's a regexp breakdown:

• <       - a left tag
• [^>] - anything but a right tag...
• +       - ...one or more times
• >       - a right tag.

The ( and ) just surrounds the groups in the expression, which are not used anyway.

The /ig suffix says that the regex is case insensitive (pointless in this case, since the rexeg doesn't mention any letters) and global stating that all occurrences should be replaced.

Answer 2

Looks like it's replacing HTML start or end tags. If you ever need to parse Regex expressions or test them, here's a great site. http://myregextester.com/index.php

NODE                     EXPLANATION
----------------------------------------------------------------------
(?i-msx:                 group, but do not capture (case-insensitive)
                         (with ^ and $ matching normally) (with . not
                         matching \n) (matching whitespace and #
                         normally):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  (                        group and capture to \1:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    <                        '<'
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    (                        group and capture to \2:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
      [^>]+                    any character except: '>' (1 or more
                               times (matching the most amount
                               possible))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    )                        end of \2
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    >                        '>'
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  )                        end of \1
----------------------------------------------------------------------
)                        end of grouping
----------------------------------------------------------------------