How To Count The Number Of Hyphens At The Beginning Of A String In Javascript?

I have a number of strings in a list, formatted as follows: -Category --Subcategory 1 --Subcategory 2 ---Subcategory-Child 2A I need to count the number of hyphens at the beginnin

Solution 1:

You can use regex to pull out the hyphens only at the beginning of a string and count the length of the match

var str = '---Subcategory-Child 2A'
var regex = /^(\-*)/g
console.log(regex.exec(str)[1].length) // 3

Solution 2:

Replace non-hyphens with space, and then tokenize and then get the length of the first token.

string.replace(/[^\-]/g, ' ').split(' ')[0].length