正则表达式匹配字符串，可以以“ The”，“ A”或“ An”开头或不以

Question

I am working on a search engine for bands and I want to make it so that the user doesn't need to type the article to find the band. So, for example, if someone wanted to find "The Black Keys," they could find them by typing "Bla," "Black Keys," "The Black Keys," or any variation like that. Here is what I have so far:

matcher = new RegExp( '^(?<=the)'+searchstring, 'i' );

Answer 1

This is a start:

var tags = ["c++", "java", "the php", "coldfusion", "a javascript", "asp", "the ruby"];
$("#autocomplete").autocomplete({
    source: function (request, response) {
        var matcher = new RegExp("^(?:(the|a) )?" + $.ui.autocomplete.escapeRegex(request.term), "i");
        response($.grep(tags, function (item) {
            return matcher.test(item);
        }));
    }
});

The regex is modified to:

• ^ - start of word
• (?: - begin a non capturing group
• (the|a) - your list of articles
• - the space between words
• )? close non capture group and make it optional.

a working fiddle