Matches “;” character in regular expression javascript

Question

I try to detect the text like this: E(id,x,y);

And the code is:

var patt1= /\bE\[[\w]+,[\d]+,[\d]+\]\;\b/i;

document.write(patt1.test("E[id,1,2];"));

the result is: false

But when I change

/\bE\[[\w]+,[\d]+,[\d]+\]\;\b/i;

to

/\bE\[[\w]+,[\d]+,[\d]+\]\;/i;

the result is: true . But it allowed E[id,1,2];moretext too.

Answer 1

Oh! I founded. The \\b doesn't "detect begin and end of string." It matches a word boundary. ^ is start-of-string, $ is end-of-string.

So I change "/\\bE[[\\w]+,[\\d]+,[\\d]+]\\;\\b/i;" to "/^E[[\\w]+,[\\d]+,[\\d]+]\\;$/i;" for the right regular. Thank

Answer 2

http://www.regexplanet.com/advanced/javascript/index.html is a good tool for trying regular expressions. I don't know why you are surprised by the results, as they are correct.