I've looked around and practiced my RegEx but I still can't get it right... Probably a noob question How would I split a string to only keep the words (a to z) and only them, split by any other character?
hello3you ?! hey 32 foo
would return
["hello","you","hey","foo"]
I tried the following, no luck:
var words = itemObject["name"].toLowerCase().split(/^([a-z]+)/g);
var words = itemObject["name"].toLowerCase().split(/[a-zA-Z]+/g);
Thanks
Instead of splitting you should think of it as a matching operation; after all, the title of your question is about extracting strings:
'hello3you ?! hey 32 foo'.match(/[a-z]+/ig);
This will return an array of strings matching a "bunch of letters".
[^a-z]+
You can split by this to get the desired result.
try: var words = itemObject["name"].toLowerCase().split(/([^a-z]+)/);
Working:
var words = itemObject["name"].match(/[a-z]+/ig);
Output:
hello,you,hey,foo
I'd suggest:
var matches = "hello3you ?! hey 32 foo!".split(/[^a-z]+/).filter(function(el) {
if (el.length) {
return el;
}
});
console.log(matches);[^a-z] is a range of characters that are not a-z (inclusive),+ requires a match of one, or more, of those characters.
"hello!" this would yield an array with two elements, the last one being an empty string.
match() is the better option. I may, however, have added a slightly complex means of dealing with that.preg_split() has a slight advantage because it allows for a flag to skip empty segments :)