Test Javascript regular expressions

This page provides a convenient means of testing regular expressions before embedding them in a Javascript program. The buttons at the bottom of this page represent calls to the Javascript methods of the same name [More information about the regular expression syntax]

Use

• After a click on the exec button, the page executes (approximately) the following code:

    var pattern = /Contents of the Pattern: field/g; 
    matches = pattern.exec(Contents of the String: field);
    display the indexed elements of matches array
       

• The re-exec continues matching on the same string after last match.
• The test and re-test buttons do the same processing but with the test method that only checks if the pattern matches the string somewhere without giving any other information.

Features

• Text fields keep track of previously entered strings, use the down arrow to retrieve one of them on an empty string. (Does not work with Safari which does not support the datalist element)
• For successful matches, the bottom area shows the values indexed by the variable for the results of the exec and the part of the input string matched is selected.

This page is patterned after Java applet with a similar facility