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 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.

score 222 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 24 '10 at 19:02

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".

You could also mention that a dot *doesn't* have any special meaning inside of a character class - instead of acting as a wildcard character (which wouldn't make any sense), it acts as a literal. — Bobby Jack, Jul 17 '14 at 10:20

score 14 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 12 '13 at 20:07

14

or just (anything but numbers):

date.split(/\D/);

answered Nov 12 '13 at 20:07

Jo3y

159
1
3

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 21 '19 at 17:33

6

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());

answered Jan 21 '19 at 17:33

Bobzius

188
2
4

1

Why the g-flag? – d-b Sep 01 '20 at 19:03

score 6 · Answer 4 · edited Jan 23 '12 at 17:36

6

you could just use

date.split(/-/);

or

date.split('-');

edited Jan 23 '12 at 17:36

Brandon

68,708
30
194
223

answered Jan 23 '12 at 17:02

Allan Ruin

5,229
7
37
42

2

Put a line break before your code and the 4 spaces will format it properly. – Brandon Jan 23 '12 at 17:36

score 5 · Answer 5 · edited Aug 20 '13 at 20:42

5

Then split it on anything but numbers:

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

edited Aug 20 '13 at 20:42

slm

15,396
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109
124

answered Aug 20 '13 at 20:25

useless

1,876
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18

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered May 20 '15 at 14:21

0

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

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

answered May 20 '15 at 14:21

Piotr

377
4
11

score -2 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 19 '19 at 20:34

-2

try this instead

date.split(/\W+/)

answered Dec 19 '19 at 20:34

Omar

9

Can you explain why this is a better answer than the 5+ already posted before? And how it actually works? – mjuarez Dec 19 '19 at 20:56
This actually worked the best out of all the answers for me. – reectrix Feb 22 '20 at 23:24

Javascript split regex question

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