Question

Here is a codesample for the flag ignore case. I was expected to receive only one match.

var str = "Sample text";
var a = new Array();
a = str.match(/S(am)(p)/i);

result

a = [Samp] [am] [p]

I was expected to have a = [Samp]

if you change i flag with g

var str = "Sample text";
var a = new Array();
a = str.match(/S(am)(p)/g);

surprise (at least for me) the result has only one element

a = [Samp]

Answer 1

The javascript regex API is extremely unintuitive as it does all sorts of magic depending on the g-flag.

I am just gonna cover how .match behaves:

• Without g-flag .match returns an array of full match plus all the capture groups or null in case of no match.

• With g-flag .match returns an array of all the full matches and capture groups don’t make a difference. null if there are no matches.