Regular Expression to find complex markers

Question

I want to use JavaScript's regular expression something like this

/marker\d+"?(\w+)"?\s/gi

In a string like this:

IDoHaveMarker1"apple" IDoAlsoHaveAMarker352pear LastPointMakingmarker3134"foo"

And I want it to return an array like this:

[ "apple", "pear", "foo" ]

The quotes are to make clear they are strings. They shouldn't be in the result.

Answer 1

If you are asking about how to actually use the regex:

To get all captures of multiple (global) matches you have to use a loop and exec in JavaScript:

var regex = /marker\d+"?(\w+)/gi;
var result = [];
var match;
while (match = regex.exec(input)) {
    result.push(match[1]);
}

(Note that you can omit the trailing "?\\s? if you are only interested in the capture, since they are optional anyway, so they don't affect the matched result.)

And no, g will not allow you to do all of that in one call. If you had omitted g then exec would return the same match every time.

As Blender mentioned, if you want to rule out things like Marker13"something Marker14bar (unmatched " ) you need to use another capturing group and a backreference. Note that this will push your desired capture to index 2 :

var regex = /marker\d+("?)(\w+)\1/gi;
var result = [];
var match;
while (match = regex.exec(input)) {
    result.push(match[2]);
}