Question

I have the following Javascript which is part of a larger function. I am doing a javascript match then trying to get the length of the match. The problem is, the length always returns 1 even when it is 10 characters long.

var content = $(this).text();
var word = /#(\w+)/ig;
var query = content.match(word);

alert(query + ' | ' + query.length);

How can I get the accurate value for the length of the match?

Answer 1

Because the result of String.match with a global regex is an array. query.length tells you there is only one match; you can access the matched string with query[0].

It appears to be a string in your alert call because Array.toString is equivalent to array.join(','). With just one element, it shows that single element.