Name
RegExp.exec() — general-purpose pattern matching
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 returns the result described earlier. ...
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