Question

112

Tokenizing strings using regular expression in Javascript

rated 0 times [ 116] [ 4] / answers: 1 / hits: 21942 / 13 Years ago, fri, december 9, 2011, 12:00:00

Suppose I've a long string containing newlines and tabs as:

var x = This is a long string.nt This is another one on next line.;

So how can we split this string into tokens, using regular expression?

I don't want to use .split(' ') because I want to learn Javascript's Regex.

A more complicated string could be this:

var y = This @is a #long $string. Alright, lets split this.;

Now I want to extract only the valid words out of this string, without special characters, and punctuation, i.e I want these:

var xwords = [This, is, a, long, string, This, is, another, one, on, next, line];



var ywords = [This, is, a, long, string, Alright, lets, split, this];

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georgeh

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2 Years ago

answered 13 Years ago christianu · Accepted Answer

Here is a jsfiddle example of what you asked: http://jsfiddle.net/ayezutov/BjXw5/1/

Basically, the code is very simple:

var y = This @is a #long $string. Alright, lets split this.;

var regex = /[^s]+/g; // This is multiple not space characters, which should be searched not once in string



var match = y.match(regex);

for (var i = 0; i<match.length; i++)

{

    document.write(match[i]);

    document.write('<br>');

}

UPDATE:
Basically you can expand the list of separator characters: http://jsfiddle.net/ayezutov/BjXw5/2/

var regex = /[^s.,!?]+/g;

UPDATE 2:
Only letters all the time:
http://jsfiddle.net/ayezutov/BjXw5/3/

var regex = /w+/g;