Name
RegExp — NN 4 IE J3 ECMA n/a
Synopsis
The RegExp
object is a static object that both generates instances of a regular
expression and monitors all regular expression in the current window
or frame. Instances of the RegExp
object are
covered in the regular expressions object description that follows
this section.
Regular expressions assist in locating text that matches patterns of characters or characteristics. For example, a regular expression can be used to find out very quickly if an entry in a text field is a five-digit number. Defining the pattern to match requires knowledge of a separate notation syntax that is beyond the scope of this book (but is covered in Mastering Regular Expressions, by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl, published by O’Reilly). A summary of the syntax can be found in the description of the regular expression object.
Properties of the RegExp
object store information
about the last operation of any regular expression in the document.
Therefore, it is conceivable that each property could change after
each regular expression operation. Such operations include not only
the methods of a regular expression object instance
(exec()
and test()
), but also
the String
object methods that accept regular
expressions as parameters (match()
,
replace()
, and split()
). Some
of these properties are passed to the regular expression object as
well, in preparation for the next operation with the regular
expression.
All properties have verbose names as well as shortcut names that begin ...
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