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 theRegExp( )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
See Also
RegExp, RegExp.exec( ), RegExp.test( ), String.match( ), String.replace( ); Chapter 10