JS: Regex and global match() not creating an array

Question

I'm trying ti use match() in order to parse through some text and return the amount of times the text shows up. I'm doing this by using a global match and then calling length on the array that is created from the match. Instead, I'm just getting a array with a single element.

$('button').click(function () {
    checkword = "/" + specialWord + "/g";
    finalAnswer = userText.match(specialWord);
    console.log(finalAnswer);
    $('#answer').html(finalAnswer + '<br>' + finalAnswer.length);
    return finalAnswer;
});

For example my search for 'is' in "this is" should return an array with a length of two, correct?

Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/

Related: [How to count string occurrence in string?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4009756/how-to-count-string-occurrence-in-string) — Ja͢ck, Nov 21 '14 at 02:28
If `specialWord` can contain special character, then you might want to escape it before passing it to RegExp constructor like in hwnd's answer — nhahtdh, Nov 21 '14 at 02:46
Or [this answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/4009787/1338292) and [this one](http://stackoverflow.com/a/7924240/1338292) in particular. — Ja͢ck, Nov 21 '14 at 03:41

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 21 '14 at 02:26

2

Use a RegExp constructor to do this and you need to change .match(specialWord) to checkword instead.

checkword = new RegExp(specialWord, "g");
finalAnswer = userText.match(checkword);

answered Nov 21 '14 at 02:26

hwnd

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JS: Regex and global match() not creating an array

1 Answers1