Guidelines for preserving regular expression matches in an array with JavaScript

If I have a regex with multiple matches like:

var matches = string.match(/\s*(regex1)?\s*(regex2)?(regex3)?\s*/i);

and if the string I'm testing looks like this:

var string = "regex1 regex3";

Is there a way to capture these values in an array:

matches[1] = "regex1";
matches[2] = "";
matches[3] = "regex3";

Note: I want the regex to match the entire string, but fill the array with placeholders for any matches it doesn't find.

Hopefully that's clear. Thank you for your assistance!

Answer №1

Whenever there is a "placeholder" already in place, unmatched groups will result in an array index where the group number matches with an undefined value. For instance,

let someString = "match2";
let matches = someString.match(/\s*(match1)?\s*(match2)?(match3)?\s*/i);

Now, the variable matches contains

["match2", undefined, "match2", undefined]

The complete regex match is stored in element 0, while elements 1-3 represent the individual groups.

This allows you to perform actions like this:

// check if group1
if (typeof matches[1] != 'undefined')

Answer №2

If you need to compare a string with regular expressions, simply use an Array join function like this:

matches[1] = "match1"; 
matches[2] = "";
matches[3] = "match3";
var myString = matches.join("");

You can choose any character to join the array elements. Alternatively, you can also do:

var myString = matches.join(" ");

UPDATE: Based on the problem description, it seems like you want the regex to output an array. For example:

 text = "First line\nSecond line";
 var regex = /(\S+) line\n?/y;

This would result in:

var match = regex.exec(text);
print(match[1]);  // prints "First"
print(regex.lastIndex); // prints 11

For more information, click here

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