Question

I have string with 2 or 3 words:

'apple grape lemon'
'apple grape'

I need to get first char from all words.
my regex:

/^(\w).*?\ (\w).*?\ ?(\w?).*?$/

For all strings this regex get only first char of 2 words.

How to fix?

Answer 1

You cannot do this with one regex (unless you are using .NET). But you can use a regex that matches one first character of a word, then get all the matches, and join them together:

var firstLetters = '';
var match = str.match(/\b\w/g)
if (match)
    firstLetters = match.join('');

Of course if you just want to get the letters on their own, there is no need for the join, since the match will simply be an array containing all those letters.

You should not, that \w is not only letters, but digits and underscores, too.