Name
RegExp.exec( ): general-purpose pattern matching â ECMAScript v3
Synopsis
regexp
.exec(string
)
Arguments
-
string
The string to be searched.
Returns
An array containing the results of the match or null
if no match was found. The format
of the returned array is described below.
Throws
-
TypeError
If this method is invoked on an object that is not a RegExp.
Description
exec( )
is the most
powerful of all the RegExp and String pattern-matching methods. It
is a general-purpose method that is somewhat more complex to use
than RegExp.test( )
, String.search( )
, String.replace( )
, and String.match( )
.
exec( )
searches
string
for text that matches
regexp
. If it finds a match, it returns
an array of results; otherwise, it returns null
. Element 0 of the returned array is
the matched text. Element 1 is the text that matched the first
parenthesized subexpression, if any, within
regexp
. Element 2 contains the text that
matched the second subexpression, and so on. The array length
property specifies the number of
elements in the array, as usual. In addition to the array elements
and the length
property, the
value returned by exec( )
also
has two other properties. The index
property specifies the character
position of the first character of the matched text. The input
property refers to
string
. This returned array is the same
as the array that is returned by the String.match( )
method, when invoked on a
nonglobal RegExp object.
When exec( )
is invoked on a nonglobal pattern, it performs the search and ...
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