JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

The RegExp Object

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, regular expressions are represented as RegExp objects. In addition to the RegExp() constructor, RegExp objects support three methods and a number of properties. RegExp pattern-matching methods and properties are described in the next two sections.

The RegExp() constructor takes one or two string arguments and creates a new RegExp object. The first argument to this constructor is a string that contains the body of the regular expression—the text that would appear within slashes in a regular-expression literal. Note that both string literals and regular expressions use the \ character for escape sequences, so when you pass a regular expression to RegExp() as a string literal, you must replace each \ character with \\. The second argument to RegExp() is optional. If supplied, it indicates the regular-expression flags. It should be g, i, m, or a combination of those letters.

For example:

// Find all five-digit numbers in a string. Note the double \\ in this case.
var zipcode = new RegExp("\\d{5}", "g");

The RegExp() constructor is useful when a regular expression is being dynamically created and thus cannot be represented with the regular-expression literal syntax. For example, to search for a string entered by the user, a regular expression must be created at runtime with RegExp().

RegExp Properties

Each RegExp object has five properties. The source property is a read-only string that contains the text of the regular expression. ...