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JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition
book

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition

by David Flanagan
November 2001
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
936 pages
68h 43m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition

Name

String.search( ) — search for a regular expression

Availability

JavaScript 1.2; JScript 3.0; ECMAScript v3

Synopsis

                  string.search(regexp)

Arguments

regexp

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

Returns

The position of the start of the first substring of string that matches regexp, or -1 if no match was found.

Description

search( ) looks for a substring matching regexp within string and returns the position of the first character of the matching substring, or -1 if no match was found.

search( ) does not do global matches; it ignores the g flag. It also ignores the lastIndex property of regexp and always searches from the beginning of the string, which means that it always returns the position of the first match in string.

Example

var s = "JavaScript is fun";
s.search(/script/i)  // Returns 4
s.search(/a(.)a/)    // Returns 1
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596000480Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata