Learning to Program

Using Regular Expressions in JavaScript

Regular expressions do nothing without a string to test them on. Let’s start with a simple string and a simple regular expression. Open the Chrome Dev Tools on any page, and create a string with your name in it; then create a regular expression with your name in it. See Listing 6.2.

Listing 6.2 My Name As a Regular Expression

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> var myName = 'Steven Foote';  "Steven Foote"> var namePattern = /Steven/;  /Steven/

Now you need to test whether the string matches the regular expression. You can do this in a few different ways, each with a slightly different purpose and output.

test returns a Boolean, true if the string matches and false if it doesn’t.

exec either returns an ...