Question

I am newbie to Javascript.

What regex will be used to match the following expression type. Please note that there could be spaces between digits.

(3,2), ( 2,3),(5, 4)

I am trying as (\d+,\d) but this is not working for multiple pairs of (x,y).

Answer 1

See the RE below: \s* means: “any whitespace”. The parentheses have a special meaning, and have to be escaped.

The first RE just matches all pairs of numbers, while the second RE also group the numbers, so that they can be referred when using the RegExp.exec function.

/\(\s*\d+\s*,\s*\d+\s*\)/g

/\(\s*(\d+)\s*,\s*(\d+)\s*\)/g

Example, get all (x,y) pairs within a string, and store the pair in an array:

var source = "(1,2), (3,4) (5,6) (7,8)"; //Comma between pairs is optional
var RE = /\(\s*(\d+)\s*,\s*(\d+)\s*\)/g, pair;
var pairList = [];
while((pair = RE.exec(source)) !== null){
    pairList.push([pair[1], pair[2]]);
}
//pairList is an array which consists all x,y pairs