Best way to get all substrings matching a RegExp in Dart

Question

I want to get a list of substrings matching a RegExp in a string. What is the best way to do this?

RegExp object from dart:core has Iterable<Match> allMatches(String input, [int start=0]) method. This is kind of what I need, but I want to get Iterable of Strings, not matches.

There is also method String stringMatch(String input), which returns a String, but only a first match.

So I wrote myslef this function using map:

Iterable<String> _allStringMatches(String text, RegExp regExp) {
  Iterable<Match> matches = regExp.allMatches(text);
  List<Match> listOfMatches = matches.toList();

  // TODO: there must be a better way to get list of Strings out of list of Matches
  Iterable<String> listOfStringMatches = listOfMatches.map((Match m) {
    return m.input.substring(m.start, m.end);
  });

  return listOfStringMatches;
}

but it seems to me that it is pretty basic functionality and I can't believe it is not in anywhere in the API. I guess there must be a better way to do such a basic task.

Answer 1

If your regexp contains only one group (like new RegExp(r'(\S+)')) you can rewrite your function to:

Iterable<String> _allStringMatches(String text, RegExp regExp) => 
    regExp.allMatches(text).map((m) => m.group(0));