Question

How can I find everything between the hyphens with regex?
Array answer for below should be [“aaa”,”bbb”,”ccc”,”ddd”]

<script>
myRe= new RegExp ("xxxxxx");
myArray = myRe.exec("-aaa-bbb-ccc-ddd-");
</script>

Also… what happens if there are comma’s in the string and they need to be included in the array?

Is this below alright…?

["a,a,a","bbb","ccc","ddd"]

Answer 1

One quick and easy solution is to look for word characters in the string:

"-aaa-bbb-ccc-ddd-".match(/[\w]+/g)

This will return ["aaa", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd"]

If you needed to match strings with commas in them as well then you could add a comma to the capture group:

// added ',' to [\w,]
"-a,a,a-bbb-ccc-ddd-".match(/[\w,]+/g)

This will return ["a,a,a", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd"]

This solution won’t scale well if you’re looking for anything to be matched between some ‘-‘s, but if you have a simple use case then I’d say use a simple match like the ones demonstrated above.

Update

Since your comment said you need to match anything between ‘-‘s, you can use the following regex:

/[^\-]+/g

This will match anything that is not a ‘-‘ in groups, so:

"-a,@$#$a,a-bbb-ccc-ddd-".match(/[^\-]+/g)

will return ["a,@$#$a,a", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd"]