Detecting if period exists in a string

Question

I apologize if this seems like a dumb question, but how would I go about searching a string to see if it contains a period? I've tried searching:

var p="This is text without a period, What now?"

alert(p.search("."));

I was under the impression that it should return -1 because there is no period in that sentence. However, it always returns 0.

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

There's many ways to do this, I would probably use indexOf() just to see if a character exists in a string :

alert( p.indexOf(".") != -1 ); // true or false

According to MDN, search() "Executes the search for a match between a regular expression and this String object.", so that would be :

alert( p.search(/\./) );

which would give you -1, and the period has special meaning in a regex, and must be escaped.