Name
String.search( ): search for a regular expression â ECMAScript v3
Synopsis
string
.search(regexp
)
Arguments
-
regexp
A RegExp object that specifies the pattern to be searched for in
string
. If this argument is not a RegExp, it is first converted to one by passing it to theRegExp( )
constructor.
Returns
The position of the start of the first substring of
string
that matches
regexp
, or â1 if no match is
found.
Description
search( )
looks for a
substring matching regexp
within
string
and returns the position of the
first character of the matching substring, or â1 if no match was
found.
search( )
does not do
global matches; it ignores the g
flag. It also ignores the lastIndex
property of
regexp
and always searches from the
beginning of the string, which means that it always returns the
position of the first match in
string
.
Example
var s = "JavaScript is fun"; s.search(/script/i) // Returns 4 s.search(/a(.)a/) // Returns 1
See Also
RegExp
, RegExp.exec( )
, RegExp.test( )
, String.match( )
, String.replace( )
; Chapter 11
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