Question

I am writing a bit of javascript that grabs user ID’s. It works, but the problem is the actual regular expression is being included in the results.

My code it:

var regex = /profile\.php\?id=(\d*)/g;
var matches = source.match(regex);

And it returns:

profile.php?id=1111,1111,profile.php?id=2222,2222,profile.php?id=33333,33333,

All I want is the user ID’s. Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

string.match with the g flag only returns strings that match the full regular expression. What you want is capturing groups, you’ll need to use RegExp.exec

Something like this:

var text="lots of stuff with something in here a few times so that something comes back multiple times when searching for something.";

var regex=new RegExp("some(thing)","g");

var result=null;

while(result=regex.exec(text)){
    document.write(result[1]);
}

You should read up on capturing groups in regex to understand why this works. The first group is always the full match then each of the capturing groups in order.