Search whole word in string

Question

I am looking for a function written in JavaScript (not in jQuery) which will return true if the given word exactly matches (should not be case sensitive).

Like...

var searchOnstring = " Hi, how are doing?"

   if( searchText == 'ho'){
     // Output: false
   }

   if( searchText == 'How'){
     // Output: true
   }

Answer 1

You could use regular expressions:

\bhow\b

Example:

/\bhow\b/i.test(searchOnstring);

If you want to have a variable word (e.g. from a user input), you have to pay attention to not include special RegExp characters.

You have to escape them, for example with the function provided in the MDN _{(scroll down a bit)}:

function escapeRegExp(string){
  return string.replace(/([.*+?^=!:${}()|\[\]\/\\])/g, "\\$1");
}

var regex = '\\b';
regex += escapeRegExp(yourDynamicString);
regex += '\\b';

new RegExp(regex, "i").test(searchOnstring);

Answer 2

Here is a function that returns true with searchText is contained within searchOnString, ignoring case:

function isMatch(searchOnString, searchText) {
  searchText = searchText.replace(/[-\/\\^$*+?.()|[\]{}]/g, '\\$&');
  return searchOnString.match(new RegExp("\\b"+searchText+"\\b", "i")) != null;
}

Update, as mentioned you should escape the input, I'm using the escape function from https://stackoverflow.com/a/3561711/241294.