Home/ Questions/Q 1002397
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-16T07:49:36+00:00

I am running a split in javascript with /\s+(AND|OR)(?=\s+)\s+/ on email IS NOT NULL

  • 0

I am running a split in javascript with /\s+(AND|OR)(?=\s+")\s+/ on

"email" IS NOT NULL AND "email" LIKE '%gmail.com' OR "email" = 'test@test.com'

Now, my understanding of regular expressions would lead me to expect obtaining the following array:

[0]: "email" IS NOT NULL
[1]: "email" LIKE '%gmail.com'
[2]: "email" = 'test@test.com'

Note: I got rid of the delimiters for clarity.

However, I obtain

[0]: "email" IS NOT NULL
[1]:  AND
[2]: "email" LIKE '%gmail.com'
[3]:  OR
[4]: "email" = 'test@test.com'

when running on Firefox 3.6.8, Chrome 5.0.375.126 and Safari 5.0.1 on OS X 10.6.4.

However, when I tried on an up to date IE8 8.0.6 with default settings and I obtain what I was expecting at first. PHP 5.2.10 with preg_split does also split it this way.

My guess is that for once the ‘good’ browsers got it wrong but I’d like more opinions.

Edit: The example I gave here with emails is a naive example. Basically I don’t know what each member can be. "xyz" = '1' AND "zyx" = 'test AND toast' is another possible input string.

What I know of the structure is that the whole string will have the following pattern:

"<attribute>" <operator> '<value>'( (AND|OR) "<attribute>" <operator> '<value>')*

Note: spaces actually represent \s+

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It looks like Firefox and Chrome got it perfectly right, since according to the specs of ECMAScriptv5 section 15.5.4.14

    If separator is a regular expression
    that contains capturing parentheses,
    then each time separator is matched
    the results (including any undefined
    results) of the capturing parentheses
    are spliced into the output array.

    For example,

    "A<B>bold</B>and<CODE>coded</CODE>".split(/<(\/)?([^<>]+)>/)

    evaluates to the array

    [“A”, undefined, “B”, “bold”, “/”,
    “B”, “and”, undefined,
    “CODE”, “coded”, “/”, “CODE”, “”]

    Pointer to the specs by Chris Leary of Mozilla.

    • 0