How can I use preg_match in jQuery?

Question

Can I use preg_match to validate phone number in jQuery? Here is my code which does not work:

if (!preg_match("/^[0-9]{3}-|\s[0-9]{3}-|\s[0-9]{4}$/", phone.val() ))  {
            phone.addClass("needsfilled");
            phone.val(phonerror);
        }

HTML <input id="phone" type="text" value="" name="phone" />

Answer 1

Javascript includes a regular expression engine, which is accessed via the string.match(), string.replace() and string.split() functions.

For example:

var mystring = "this is a sentence";
mystring = mystring.replace(/sentence/,'string');

var matches = mystring.match(/\b\w+\b/);

That should provide you with essentially the same functionality as preg_match().

So to do the same validation as the preg_match in your question:

if(!phone.val().match(/^[0-9]{3}-|\s[0-9]{3}-|\s[0-9]{4}$/)) {
     phone.addClass("needsfilled");
     phone.val(phonerror);
}

If you absolutely insist on having a function called preg_match() which works exactly like the PHP version, there is a project called PHPJS, which aims to implement PHP functions in Javascript. A quick look at their site shows that although they don't currently have a fully working preg_match() implementation, they have an unfinished implementation which you may want to look at. But frankly, the built-in Javascript .match() function should be more than sufficient.