CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregexsplit
Craig
Craig

Reputation: 3102

Javascript split regex 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 either by a '-','.','/' and ' '.

var date = "02-25-2010";
var myregexp2 = new RegExp("-."); 
dateArray = date.split(myregexp2);

What is the correct regex for this any and all help would be great.

Upvotes: 150

Views: 262838

Answers (7)

Omar
Omar

Reputation: 9

try this instead

date.split(/\W+/)

Upvotes: -2

Bobzius
Bobzius

Reputation: 218

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());

Upvotes: 6

Piotr
Piotr

Reputation: 369

or just use for date strings 2015-05-20 or 2015.05.20

date.split(/\.|-/);

Upvotes: 0

Jo3y
Jo3y

Reputation: 179

or just (anything but numbers):

date.split(/\D/);

Upvotes: 16

useless
useless

Reputation: 1906

Then split it on anything but numbers:

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

Upvotes: 5

Allan Ruin
Allan Ruin

Reputation: 5277

you could just use 

date.split(/-/);

or

date.split('-');

Upvotes: 6

Daniel Vandersluis
Daniel Vandersluis

Reputation: 94133

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".

Upvotes: 228

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