JavaScript Regex Global Match Groups

Question

Update: This question is a near duplicate of this

I'm sure the answer to my question is out there, but I couldn't find the words to express it succinctly. I am trying to do the following with JavaScript regex:

var input = "'Warehouse','Local Release','Local Release DA'"; var regex = /'(.*?)'/g;  console.log(input.match(regex));  // Actual: // ["'Warehouse'", "'Local Release'", "'Local Release DA'"]  // What I'm looking for (without the '): // ["Warehouse", "Local Release", "Local Release DA"] 

Is there a clean way to do this with JavaScript regex? Obviously I could strip out the 's myself, but I'm looking for the correct way to caputre globally matched groupings with regex.

Answer 1

To do this with a regex, you will need to iterate over it with .exec() in order to get multiple matched groups. The g flag with match will only return multiple whole matches, not multiple sub-matches like you wanted. Here's a way to do it with .exec().

var input = "'Warehouse','Local Release','Local Release DA'"; var regex = /'(.*?)'/g;  var matches, output = []; while (matches = regex.exec(input)) {     output.push(matches[1]); } // result is in output here 

Working demo: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/VSczR/

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With certain assumptions about what's in the strings, you could also just use this:

var input = "'Warehouse','Local Release','Local Release DA'"; var output = input.replace(/^'|'$/, "").split("','"); 

Working demo: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/MFNm3/

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Note: With modern Javascript engines as of 2021, you can use str.matchAll(regex) and get all matches in one function call.

Answer 2

There is an ECMAScript proposal called String.prototype.matchAll() that would fulfill your needs.