Replace any words with modified version of themselves

Question

I'm looking for an easy way to turn this string:

(java || javascript) && vbscript

Into this string:

(str.search('java') || str.search('javascript')) && str.search('vbscript')

ie replace each word in the string with str.search('" + word + "')

I've looked at mystring.match(/[-\w]+/g); which will pull any words out into an array (but not their position)

Answer 1

You can call replace:

mystring.replace(/[-\w]+/g, "str.search('$&')");

Note that this is an XSS hole, since the user input can contain 's.

Answer 2

Just a fixed version with correct capture and using 1 as backtrack index. See details in "Specifying a string as a parameter" section of String.replace.

mystring.replace(/([-\w]+)/g, "str.search('$1')");