JavaScript: The Good Parts

Elements

Let's look more closely at the elements that make up regular expressions.

Regexp Choice

A regexp choice contains one or more regexp sequences. The sequences are separated by the | (vertical bar) character. The choice matches if any of the sequences match. It attempts to match each of the sequences in order. So:

"into".match(/in|int/)

matches the in in into. It wouldn't match int because the match of in was successful.

Regexp Sequence

A regexp sequence contains one or more regexp factors. Each factor can optionally be followed by a quantifier that determines how many times the factor is allowed to appear. If there is no quantifier, then the factor will be matched one time.

Regexp Factor

A regexp factor can be a character, a parenthesized group, a character class, or an escape sequence. All characters are treated literally except for the control characters and the special characters:

\ / [ ] ( ) { } ? + * | . ^ $

which must be escaped with a \ prefix if they are to be matched literally. When in doubt, any special character can be given a \ prefix to make it literal. The \ prefix does not make letters or digits literal.

An unescaped . matches any character except a line-ending character.