passing variable into regular expression in a function

Question

trying to pass a variable into a beefy regex, I can get it to work outside the function, but not sure how to get it to work within a function, or why it match[1] seems to be returning null. Lots of info on replacing, but not on finding words after a keyword.

here is what I have

  var s = 'match my word after this word';
  function returnWordAfter(theSentence, theWord){
    var TheRegEx = new RegExp("/"+theWord+"\s(\w*)/");
    var matches = theSentence.match(TheRegEx, '');
    return matches[1];
  }
  var matchedWord = returnWordAfter(s, "this");
  console.log(matchedWord);

Answer 1

Don't put surrounding / s and escape backslashes ( \\ ):

new RegExp(theWord + "\\s(\\w*)");

---

var theWord = "hello";
var theRegEx = new RegExp(theWord + "\\s(\\w*)");
"hello world".match(theRegEx) // => ["hello world", "world"]