Question

How would you split Regex subexpression matches in to multi-dimensional string arrays?

I have a “myvar” string of:

1-4:2;5-9:1.89;10-24:1.79;25-99:1.69;100-149:1.59;150-199:1.49;200-249:1.39;250+:1.29

which is a repeat of QuantityLow - QuantityHigh : PriceEach ;

I used this “myreg” Regex /(\d+)[-+](\d*):(\d+\.?\d*);?/g

Used it with var myarray = myvar.match(myreg);

that produced:

myarray[0] = "1-4:2;"
myarray[1] = "5-9:1.89;"
myarray[2] = "10-24:1.79;"
myarray[3] = "25-99:1.69;"
myarray[4] = "100-149:1.59;"
myarray[5] = "150-199:1.49;"
myarray[6] = "200-249:1.39;"
myarray[7] = "250+:1.29"

Fantastic! Except that I need the strings broken further by the Q1 – Q2 : P as noted above. The regex is already setup to identify the parts with parenthesis. I would think this could be done with a single Regex expression, or at least two, rather than setting up some sort of loop.

Thanks for the feedback.

Answer 1

You didn’t say what the exact output you expect, but I imagine something like this output may be intuitive.

Given:

var myvar = "1-4:2;5-9:1.89;10-24:1.79;25-99:1.69;100-149:1.59;150-199:1.49;200-249:1.39;250+:1.29";

A quick way to capture all sub-matches is:

var matches = [];
myvar.replace(/(\d+)[-+](\d*):(\d+\.?\d*);?/g, function(m, a, b, c) {
    matches.push([a, b, c])
});

(Note: you can capture the same output with a [potentially more readable] loop):

var myreg = /(\d+)[-+](\d*):(\d+\.?\d*);?/g;
var matches = [];
while(myreg.exec(myvar)) {
    matches.push([RegExp.$1, RegExp.$2, RegExp.$3])
}

Either way, the outcome is an array of matches:

matches[0]; // ["1", "4", "2"]
matches[1]; // ["5", "9", "1.89"]
matches[2]; // ["10", "24", "1.79"]
matches[3]; // ["25", "99", "1.69"]
matches[4]; // ["100", "149", "1.59"]
matches[5]; // ["150", "199", "1.49"]
matches[6]; // ["200", "249", "1.39"]
matches[7]; // ["250", "", "1.29"]