Learning JavaScript, 3rd Edition

Chapter 17. Regular Expressions

Regular expressions provide sophisticated string matching functionality. If you want to match things that “look like” an email address or a URL or a phone number, regular expressions are your friends. A natural complement to string matching is string replacement, and regular expressions support that as well—for example, if you want to match things that look like email addresses and replace them with a hyperlink for that email address.

Many introductions to regular expressions use esoteric examples such as “match aaaba and abaaba but not abba,” which has the advantage of breaking the complexity of regular expressions into neat chunks of functionality, but has the disadvantage of seeming very pointless (when do you ever need to match aaaba?). I am going to try to introduce the features of regular expressions using practical examples from the get-go.

Regular expressions are often abbreviated “regex” or “regexp”; in this book, we’ll use the former for brevity.

Substring Matching and Replacing

The essential job of a regex is to match a substring within a string, and optionally replace it. Regexes allow you to do this with incredible power and flexibility, so before we dive into it, let’s briefly cover the non-regex search and replace functionality of String.prototype, which is suitable for very modest search and replacement needs.

If all you need to do is determine if a specific substring exists in a bigger string, the following String.prototype methods ...