Javascript split regex question

Question

hello I am trying what I thought would be a rather easy regex in Javascript but is giving me lots of trouble. I want the ability to split a date via javascript splitting ei

Answer 1

Say your string is:

let str = `word1
word2;word3,word4,word5;word7
word8,word9;word10`;

You want to split the string by the following delimiters:

• Colon
• Semicolon
• New line

You could split the string like this:

let rawElements = str.split(new RegExp('[,;\n]', 'g'));

Finally, you may need to trim the elements in the array:

let elements = rawElements.map(element => element.trim());

Answer 2

You need the put the characters you wish to split on in a character class, which tells the regular expression engine "any of these characters is a match". For your purposes, this would look like:

date.split(/[.,\/ -]/)

Although dashes have special meaning in character classes as a range specifier (ie [a-z] means the same as [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz]), if you put it as the last thing in the class it is taken to mean a literal dash and does not need to be escaped.

To explain why your pattern didn't work, /-./ tells the regular expression engine to match a literal dash character followed by any character (dots are wildcard characters in regular expressions). With "02-25-2010", it would split each time "-2" is encountered, because the dash matches and the dot matches "2".

Answer 3

try this instead

date.split(/\W+/)

Answer 4

you could just use

date.split(/-/);

or

date.split('-');

Answer 5

or just (anything but numbers):

date.split(/\D/);

Answer 6

Then split it on anything but numbers:

date.split(/[^0-9]/);