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I want to match a portion of a string using a regular expression and then access that parenthesized substring:

var myString = "something format_abc"; // I want "abc"

var arr = /(?:^|\s)format_(.*?)(?:\s|$)/.exec(myString);

console.log(arr); // Prints: [" format_abc", "abc"] .. so far so good.
console.log(arr[1]); // Prints: undefined  (???)
console.log(arr[0]); // Prints: format_undefined (!!!)

I want to match a portion of a string using a regular expression and then access that parenthesized substring:

var myString = "something format_abc"; // I want "abc"

var arr = /(?:^|\s)format_(.*?)(?:\s|$)/.exec(myString);

console.log(arr); // Prints: [" format_abc", "abc"] .. so far so good.
console.log(arr[1]); // Prints: undefined  (???)
console.log(arr[0]); // Prints: format_undefined (!!!)

What am I doing wrong?


I've discovered that there was nothing wrong with the regular expression code above: the actual string which I was testing against was this:

"date format_%A"

Reporting that "%A" is undefined seems a very strange behaviour, but it is not directly related to this question, so I've opened a new one, Why is a matched substring returning "undefined" in JavaScript?.


The issue was that console.log takes its parameters like a printf statement, and since the string I was logging ("%A") had a special value, it was trying to find the value of the next parameter.

Share Improve this question edited Jan 21, 2023 at 19:24 Michael M. 11.1k11 gold badges21 silver badges43 bronze badges asked Jan 11, 2009 at 7:21 nickfnickf 546k198 gold badges658 silver badges725 bronze badges 1
  • for future visitors: Note that if matchAll is used, the returned value will be an "iterator" (an "iterable iterator" to be more precise), BUT NOT an "array", so e.g., for(const match of matches) will work, but matches[0] will be undefined. Also note that the returned iterator is non-restartable. – aderchox Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 9:47
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23 Answers 23

Reset to default 2040

Update: 2019-09-10

The old way to iterate over multiple matches was not very intuitive. This lead to the proposal of the String.prototype.matchAll method. This new method is in the ECMAScript 2020 specification. It gives us a clean API and solves multiple problems. It is in major browsers and JS engines since Chrome 73+ / Node 12+ and Firefox 67+.

The method returns an iterator and is used as follows:

const string = "something format_abc";
const regexp = /(?:^|\s)format_(.*?)(?:\s|$)/g;
const matches = string.matchAll(regexp);
    
for (const match of matches) {
  console.log(match);
  console.log(match.index)
}

As it returns an iterator, we can say it's lazy, this is useful when handling particularly large numbers of capturing groups, or very large strings. But if you need, the result can be easily transformed into an Array by using the spread syntax or the Array.from method:

function getFirstGroup(regexp, str) {
  const array = [...str.matchAll(regexp)];
  return array.map(m => m[1]);
}

// or:
function getFirstGroup(regexp, str) {
  return Array.from(str.matchAll(regexp), m => m[1]);
}

In the meantime, while this proposal gets more wide support, you can use the official shim package.

Also, the internal workings of the method are simple. An equivalent implementation using a generator function would be as follows:

function* matchAll(str, regexp) {
  const flags = regexp.global ? regexp.flags : regexp.flags + "g";
  const re = new RegExp(regexp, flags);
  let match;
  while (match = re.exec(str)) {
    yield match;
  }
}

A copy of the original regexp is created; this is to avoid side-effects due to the mutation of the lastIndex property when going through the multple matches.

Also, we need to ensure the regexp has the global flag to avoid an infinite loop.

I'm also happy to see that even this StackOverflow question was referenced in the discussions of the proposal.

original answer

You can access capturing groups like this:

var myString = "something format_abc";
var myRegexp = /(?:^|\s)format_(.*?)(?:\s|$)/g;
var myRegexp = new RegExp("(?:^|\\s)format_(.*?)(?:\\s|$)", "g");
var matches = myRegexp.exec(myString);
console.log(matches[1]); // abc

And if there are multiple matches you can iterate over them:

var myString = "something format_abc";
var myRegexp = new RegExp("(?:^|\\s)format_(.*?)(?:\\s|$)", "g");
match = myRegexp.exec(myString);
while (match != null) {
  // matched text: match[0]
  // match start: match.index
  // capturing group n: match[n]
  console.log(match[0])
  match = myRegexp.exec(myString);
}

Here’s a method you can use to get the n​th capturing group for each match:

function getMatches(string, regex, index) {
  index || (index = 1); // default to the first capturing group
  var matches = [];
  var match;
  while (match = regex.exec(string)) {
    matches.push(match[index]);
  }
  return matches;
}


// Example :
var myString = 'something format_abc something format_def something format_ghi';
var myRegEx = /(?:^|\s)format_(.*?)(?:\s|$)/g;

// Get an array containing the first capturing group for every match
var matches = getMatches(myString, myRegEx, 1);

// Log results
document.write(matches.length + ' matches found: ' + JSON.stringify(matches))
console.log(matches);

var myString = "something format_abc";
var arr = myString.match(/\bformat_(.*?)\b/);
console.log(arr[0] + " " + arr[1]);

The \b isn't exactly the same thing. (It works on --format_foo/, but doesn't work on format_a_b) But I wanted to show an alternative to your expression, which is fine. Of course, the match call is the important thing.

Last but not least, I found one line of code that worked fine for me (JS ES6):

let reg = /#([\S]+)/igm; // Get hashtags.
let string = 'mi alegría es total! ✌

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