Regex fun again...
Take for example http://something.com/en/page
I want to test for an exact match on /en/ including the forward slashes, otherwise it could match 'en' from other parts of the string.
I'm sure this is easy, for someone other than me!
EDIT:
I'm using it for a string.match() in javascript
Well it really depends on what programming language will be executing the regex, but the actual regex is simply
/en/
For .Net the following code works properly:
string url = "http://something.com/en/page";
bool MatchFound = Regex.Match(url, "/en/").Success;
Here is the JavaScript version:
var url = 'http://something.com/en/page';
if (url.match(/\/en\//)) {
alert('match found');
}
else {
alert('no match');
}
DUH
Thank you to Welbog and Chris Ballance to making what should have been the most obvious point. This does not require Regular Expressions to solve. It simply is a contains statement. Regex should only be used where it is needed and that should have been my first consideration and not the last.
If you're trying to match /en/ specifically, you don't need a regular expression at all. Just use your language's equivalent of contains to test for that substring.
If you're trying to match any two-letter part of the URL between two slashes, you need an expression like this:
/../
If you want to capture the two-letter code, enclose the periods in parentheses:
/(..)/
Depending on your language, you may need to escape the slashes:
\/..\/
\/(..)\/
And if you want to make sure you match letters instead of any character (including numbers and symbols), you might want to use an expression like this instead:
/[a-z]{2}/
Which will be recognized by most regex variations.
Again, you can escape the slashes and add a capturing group this way:
\/([a-z]{2})\/
And if you don't need to escape them:
/([a-z]{2})/
This expression will match any string in the form /xy/ where x and y are letters. So it will match /en/, /fr/, /de/, etc.
In JavaScript, you'll need the escaped version: \/([a-z]{2})\/.
You don't need a regex for this:
location.pathname.substr(0, 4) === "/en/"
Of course, if you insist on using a regex, use this:
/^\/en\//.test(location.pathname)