How to use a regular expression to find delimited needles within a haystack in Javascript?

Question

In Javascript, how can I use a regular expression to iterate through a string to isolate all occurances of strings starting with a '{' and ending with a '}' character?

So, for example the haystack string may be:

Lorem ipsum dolor {sit} amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. {Praesent} tincidunt, sapien non ultricies posuere, justo felis {placerat erat}, a laoreet felis justo in nisl. Donec.

The function would therefore need to return the following values:

1. sit
2. Praesent
3. placerat erat

All help appreciated!

Answer 1

string.match(/{.*?}/g);

To elaborate: we use the match method for Strings to execute a regexp search. The g at the end of the regexp stand for 'global' and means find all matches. When executed in g mode the match method returns an array of all matches.

As for the regexp itself, its rather simple. Just find zero or more (*) instances of any character (.) between { and }.

Answer 2

You can do it like this:

var subject = 'Lorem ipsum dolor {sit} amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. {Praesent} tincidunt, sapien non ultricies posuere, justo felis {placerat erat}, a laoreet felis justo in nisl. Donec.'
subject.match(/\{[^}]+\}/g);

Note that it still contains the { and }.