So I have the following url:
var oURL = "https://graph.facebook.com/#{username}/posts?access_token=#{token}";
I want to take username and token out of it;
I tried:
var match = (/#\{(.*?)\}/g.exec(oURL));
console.log(match);
but it is giving me:
["#{username}", "username", index: 27, input: "https://graph.facebook.com/#{username}/posts?access_token=#{token}"
Why isn't catching token?
Thanks
The problem is that exec only returns the first match from the given index whenever called.
Returns
If the match succeeds, the
exec()method returns an array and updates properties of the regular expression object. The returned array has the matched text as the first item, and then one item for each capturing parenthesis that matched containing the text that was captured.If the match fails, the
exec()method returns null.
You would need to loop, continuously matching again to find all the matches.
var matches = [],
match,
regex = /#\{(.*?)\}/g,
oURL = "https://graph.facebook.com/#{username}/posts?access_token=#{token}";
while (match = regex.exec(oURL)) {
matches.push(match)
}
console.log(matches)However, if you are only interested in the first capture group, you can only add those to the matches array:
var matches = [],
match,
regex = /#\{(.*?)\}/g,
oURL = "https://graph.facebook.com/#{username}/posts?access_token=#{token}";
while (match = regex.exec(oURL)) {
matches.push(match[1])
}
console.log(matches)
Try this instead:
oURL.match(/#\{(.*?)\}/g)
splice() the string to return only the part of the string that you want.
string.match does not return capture groups if it includes the g flag. It's weird, but that's how it works. It just returns multiple matches in the string. Without the g flag string.match returns the same result as regexp.exec. Then to top off the JS weirdness regexp.exec won't return multiple capture groups as a single result, even with the g flag. It does however, update the lastMatchIndex property of the expression so you can match against the string in a loop and pull out all the capture group contents.The answer you accepted is perfect, but I thought I'd also add that it's pretty easy to create a little helper function like this:
function getMatches(str, expr) {
var matches = [];
var match;
while (match = expr.exec(str)) {
matches.push(match[1]);
}
return matches;
}
Then you can use it a little more intuitively.
var oURL = "https://graph.facebook.com/#{username}/posts?access_token=#{token}";
var expr = /#\{([^\{]*)?\}/g;
var result = getMatches(oURL, expr);
console.log(result);
Try this:
var match = (/#\{(.*?)\}.*?#\{(.*?)\}/g.exec(oURL));
