Question

I have a variable that contains some text, some html, basically can be a string. I need to search the variable for a specific string to process that variable differently if it is contained. Here is a snippet of what I am trying to do, does not work obviously 🙂

$.each(data.results,
   function(i, results) {
   var text = this.text                   
   var pattern = new RegExp("^[SEARCHTERM]$");
    if(pattern.test( text ) )
    alert(text);  //was hoping this would alert the SEARCHTERM if found...

Answer 1

You could use .indexOf() instead to perform the search.

If the string is not found, it returns -1. If it is found, it returns the first zero-based index where it was located.

var text = this.text;
var term = "SEARCHTERM";

if( text.indexOf( term ) != -1 )
    alert(term);

If you were hoping for an exact match, which your use of ^ and $ seems to imply, you could just do an === comparison.

var text = this.text;
var term = "SEARCHTERM";

if( text === term )
    alert(term);

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EDIT: Based on your comment, you want an exact match, but === isn’t working, while indexOf() is. This is sometimes the case if there’s some whitespace that needs to be trimmed.

Try trimming the whitespace using jQuery’s jQuery.trim() method.

var text = $.trim( this.text );
var term = "SEARCHTERM";

if( text === term )
    alert(term);

If this doesn’t work, I’d recommend logging this.text to the console to see if it is the value you expect.