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JavaScript regular expressions

📖 Deeper dive reading: MDN Regular expressions

Regular expression support is built right into JavaScript. If you are not familiar with regular expressions, you can think of them as textual pattern matchers. You use a regular expression to find text in a string so that you can replace it, or simply to know that it exists.

You can create a regular expression using the class constructor or a regular expression literal.

const objRegex = new RegExp('ab*', 'i');
const literalRegex = /ab*/i;

The string class has several functions that accept regular expressions. This includes match, replace, search, and split. For a quick test to see if there is a match you can use the regular expression object's test function.

const petRegex = /(dog)|(cat)|(bird)/gim;
const text = 'Both cats and dogs are pets, but not rocks.';

text.match(petRegex);
// RETURNS: ['cat', 'dog']

text.replace(petRegex, 'animal');
// RETURNS: Both animals and animals are pets, but not rocks.

petRegex.test(text);
// RETURNS: true