Javascript regular expression split

Question

This is my string

 var str = "Here is some &text:also , here is &another:one"
 var myRegExp = /\b\s(\&){1}(\w)+(\:){1}(\w)+\s?\b/g
 str.match(myRegExp)
 //[" &text:also", " &another:one"]

Works as expected till now, the problem is with the splitting

str.split(myRegExp)

Expectations: ["Here is some" , ", here is"]
Reality ["Here is some", "&", "t", ":", "o", " , here is", "&", "r", ":", "e", ""]

What could be the reason for this ? I can extract my required array by looping over and splitting at the matches, isnt there any shortcut apart from that ?

Oh that works w/o escaping too thanks for the info, I was being careful — Mudassir Ali
– Mudassir Ali, Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 11:25

Anirudha · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-05 11:19:22Z

2

This is because the regex engine is also including the group values into the result..use (?:)

So the regex to split would be

/\b\s(?:\&){1}(?:\w)+(?:\:){1}(?:\w)+\s?\b/g

Or there is no need of grouping it at all

/\b\s\&{1}\w+\:{1}\w+\s?\b/g

answered Dec 5, 2012 at 11:19

Anirudha

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garyh · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-05 11:26:07Z

1

You don't need the groupings or the {1} in the regex. Use:

var myRegExp = /\b\s&\w+:\w+\s?\b/g

answered Dec 5, 2012 at 11:26

garyh

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1 Comment

Mudassir Ali Over a year ago

I just posted a raw example, my actual regex has grouping though but for the given example groupings messed up the split, Thanks for the correction

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