Return positions of a regex match() in Javascript?

Question

Is there a way to retrieve the (starting) character positions inside a string of the results of a regex match() in Javascript?

Answer 1

exec returns an object with a index property:

var match = /bar/.exec("foobar");  if (match) {      console.log("match found at " + match.index);  }

And for multiple matches:

var re = /bar/g,      str = "foobarfoobar";  while ((match = re.exec(str)) != null) {      console.log("match found at " + match.index);  }

Answer 2

Here's what I came up with:

// Finds starting and ending positions of quoted text  // in double or single quotes with escape char support like \" \'  var str = "this is a \"quoted\" string as you can 'read'";    var patt = /'((?:\\.|[^'])*)'|"((?:\\.|[^"])*)"/igm;    while (match = patt.exec(str)) {    console.log(match.index + ' ' + patt.lastIndex);  }