Question: I have a text containing HTML and my own special mark-up. Before I print the text, I need to know its length, so I can generate apropriate speech bubble.

I am trying to get the actual length of the string, but I am unable to get length of all special mark-ups. 

He're an example of the string

`var text = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet [T1]. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed aliquam accumsan elit, non vestibulum ex venenatis vitae. <br /><br />[D|1000] Hesitulus <br /> <span class="important"> l[D|100]o[D|100]r[D|100]e[D|100]m</span> <br />`'

I am trying to get the length of all "[]"-type substrings using a regexp, but I am no master of that and I fail only having the first one. Tried few more options, but with no success.

```
var allMyMarkup = text.match( /(\[.*?\])/); // selecting only the first code

```

How to get all occurences of my pattern?

Answer: 
Use 'g' modifier like below:

```
text.match( /(\[.*?\])/g)

```

[**g** modifier](http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_regexp_g.asp) refers to 'global', which means, find all matches, not just the fist one.
Use:

```
document.querySelector('.your_element').innerHTML.length;

```

The innerHTML method strip the HTML tags.