JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition

Name

String.match( ) — find one or more regular expression matches

Availability

JavaScript 1.2; JScript 3.0; ECMAScript v3

Synopsis

                  string.match(regexp)

Arguments

regexp

A RegExp object that specifies the pattern to be matched. If this argument is not a RegExp, it is first converted to one by passing it to the RegExp( ) constructor.

Returns

An array containing the results of the match. The contents of the array depend on whether regexp has the global g attribute set. Details on this return value are given below.

Description

match( ) searches string for one or more matches of regexp. The behavior of this method depends significantly on whether regexp has the g attribute or not. See Chapter 10 for full details on regular expressions.

If regexp does not have the g attribute, match( ) searches string for a single match. If no match is found, match( ) returns null. Otherwise, it returns an array containing information about the match that it found. Element 0 of the array contains the matched text. The remaining elements contain the text that matched any parenthesized subexpressions within the regular expression. In addition to these normal array elements, the returned array also has two object properties. The index property of the array specifies the character position within string of the start of the matched text. Also, the input property of the returned array is a reference to string itself.

If regexp has the g flag, match( ) does a global search, searching string for all matching substrings. ...