Question

I have a JSON array:

[{"name":"foo bar"},{"name":"john doe"}]

Now, I want to make a function: when I’m typing in an input field “foo”, “foo bar” has to appear. But if I type “bar”, “foo bar” has to appear also.

So how can I check if a text contains the input?

(I hope my question is clear enough)

Answer 1

For this simple task you don’t really need regular expressions. Here is how to find out whether a string contains a substring:

var string = 'foo bar';
string.indexOf('foo') != -1 // true
string.indexOf('bar') != -1 // true
string.indexOf('baz') != -1 // false

If you wanted to make the search a bit more user-friendly, you could make it case-insensitive:

function matches(string, substring) {
   return string.toLowerCase().indexOf(substring.toLowerCase()) != -1
}

matches('Foo Bar', 'BAR'); // true