Examples

Example 1-25. Simple match

//Find Spider-Man, Spiderman, SPIDER-MAN, etc.
    var dailybugle = "Spider-Man Menaces City!";

    //regex must match entire string
    var regex = /spider[- ]?man/i;

    if (dailybugle.search(regex)) {
      //do something
    }

Example 1-26. Match and capture group

//Match dates formatted like MM/DD/YYYY, MM-DD-YY,...
    var date = "12/30/1969";
    var p =
      new RegExp("^(\\d\\d)[-/](\\d\\d)[-/](\\d\\d(?:\\d\\
d)?)$");

    var result = p.exec(date);
    if (result != null) {
      var month = result[1];
      var day   = result[2];
      var year  = result[3];

Example 1-27. Simple substitution

//Convert <br> to <br /> for XHTML compliance
    String text = "Hello world. <br>";

    var pattern = /<br>/ig;

    test.replace(pattern, "<br />");

Example 1-28. Harder substitution

//urlify - turn URLs into HTML links
   var text = "Check the web site, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regexppr.";
   var regex =
        "\\b"                       // start at word boundary
     +  "("                         // capture to $1
     +  "(https?|telnet|gopher|file|wais|ftp) :"
                                    // resource and colon
     +  "[\\w/\\#~:.?+=&%@!\\-]+?"  // one or more valid chars
                                    // take little as possible
     +  ")"
     +  "(?="                       // lookahead
     +  "[.:?\\-]*"                 // for possible punct
     +  "(?:[^\\w/\\#~:.?+=&%@!\\-]"// invalid character
     +  "|$)"                       // or end of string
     +  ")";

    text.replace(regex, "<a href=\"$1\">$1</a>");

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