Introduction.  We saw a large variety of methods that can be used to operate on strings in JavaScript.  Now we will present one last somewhat introductory example to illustrate finding substrings and replacing them with something else.

While there are a huge variety of other sorts of things we could investigate, you should copy the following code into a file called SearchReplace.html.

• The color of money is hopefully in the black in the text area 
• black in the textbox containing what is to be replaced
• green in the textbox containing what you want to replace it with

before submitting it, you should get a response like the following.

Now we need to discuss the code.

The Code.  The first set of code in the function 

function searchReplace(the_contents, to_find,to_replace)
{
// first we all going to find the first occurrence of the substring
// initializing some variables

var search_message = "These are where the string " + to_find + " were found.\n";

var position = the_contents.search(to_find);
search_message += "At position " + position.toString() + " in the text area.\n"


// displaying the results in an alert
alert(search_message);

the desired string.  I have also put in a little alert( ) function to display the results of these initial assignments to assist in debugging and clarification.

The rest of the code in the function is to replace all occurrences of the found string with the replacement string.

While, this is really quite simple it illustrates some more string methods.

Finally, the form is really quite simple with a text area and two text boxes for input.  The search and replace are executed when the user presses the submit button.