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Question

Regex in javascript always matches only 1 character?

Answer 1

+3 A:

You can use the following code:

var r;
if(allow_float){
    r=/^\$?\d[\d,\.\W]+$/;
} else {
    r = /^\$?\d[\d,\W]+$/;
}

return r.test(text);

EDIT: Reject single $.

The (unescaped) ^ and $ characters match the beginning and of the string, respectively. Therefore, this will only return true if it matches the entire string.

By the way, your regex is very liberal; it matches strings like $1!2@3#4$5%6^7&8*9(0),.1,.4.

I recommend using Javascript's built-in number-parsing methods, like this:

function __numberBox__correctFormat(text,allowFloat){
    if (text.charAt(0) === '$')
        text = text.substring(1);

    return (allowFloat ? parseFloat : parseInt)(text.replace(',', ''), 10);
}

Without the ternary cleverness, that would look like this:

text = text.replace(',', '');
if(allowFloat)
    return parseFloat(text);
return parseInt(text, 10);

SLaks 2010-01-19 21:52:54

I knew this had to be possible this way! Well, that's very close to what I want. The only problem is it will accept an input of just `$`

Earlz 2010-01-19 21:55:44

Even though it's not an "exact" answer to my question, I find that using javascript's built in parsing looks much more maintainable and usable...

Earlz 2010-01-19 22:05:23

Answer 2

+6 A:

The return value of Regex.exec is always an array containing the list of matches. In your case, the regex will match the whole string so the return value is an array with 1 element that contains the match.

/\$?[\d,\.\W]+/.exec("$493.29")
["$493.29"]

Chetan Sastry 2010-01-19 21:53:40

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Regex in javascript always matches only 1 character?

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