Splitting string into array of words using Regular Expressions

Question

I'm trying to split a string into an array of words, however I want to keep the spaces after each word. Here's what I'm trying:

var re = /[a-z]+[$\s+]/gi;
var test = "test   one two     three   four ";
var results = test.match(re);

The results I expect are:

[0]: "test   "
[1]: "one "
[2]: "two     "
[3]: "three   "
[4]: "four "

However, it only matches up to one space after each word:

[0]: "test "
[1]: "one "
[2]: "two "
[3]: "three "
[4]: "four "

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Consider:

var results = test.match(/\S+\s*/g);

That would guarantee you don't miss any characters (besides a few spaces at the beginnings, but \S*\s* can take care of that)

Your original regex reads:

• [a-z]+ - match any number of letters (at least one)
• [$\s+] - much a single character - $, + or whitespace. With no quantifier after this group, you only match a single space.