How do you access the matched groups in a JavaScript regular expression

Question

I want to match a portion of a string using a regular expression and then access that parenthesized substring:

var myString = "something format_abc"; // I want "abc"

var arr = /(?:^|\s)format_(.*?)(?:\s|$)/.exec(myString);

console.log(arr);     // Prints: [" format_abc", "abc"] .. so far so good.
console.log(arr[1]);  // Prints: undefined  (???)
console.log(arr[0]);  // Prints: format_undefined (!!!)

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Hello,

Here’s a method you can use to get the n​th capturing group for each match:

function getMatches(string, regex, index) {
  index || (index = 1); // default to the first capturing group
  var matches = [];
  var match;
  while (match = regex.exec(string)) {
    matches.push(match[index]);
  }
  return matches;
}


// Example :
var myString = 'something format_abc something format_def something format_ghi';
var myRegEx = /(?:^|\s)format_(.*?)(?:\s|$)/g;

// Get an array containing the first capturing group for every match
var matches = getMatches(myString, myRegEx, 1);

// Log results
document.write(matches.length + ' matches found: ' + JSON.stringify(matches))
console.log(matches);