Question

I have the following php function which i wrote a while ago. Now however, I’m moving some parsing/matching to the client side.

function artist_name_to_regex($art_name){
    $regex_part =   preg_quote($art_name);
    $regex_part =   preg_replace('('|\')', '.+', $regex_part);
    $regex_part =   preg_replace('/ /i', '\s?', $regex_part);
    $regex_part =   preg_replace('/(and|&|&|\+)/i', '(and|&|&|\+)', $regex_part);
    return $regex_part;
}

I’d like to call it like this from js:

var regex = artist_name_to_regex('David & the Smokey Sea Horses!');
if(some_str.match(/regex/ig)){
    alert('match found!');
}

I need to modify the top function so that it:

a) is written in javascript

b) returns a regex that will work with javascipt

Answer 1

Why do you need to construct a regular expression like that? It looks as if you need to know whether a string occurs within another one…

Which can much more easily be tested like this:

if (some_str.indexOf('David & the Smokey Sea Horses!') !== -1) {
    alert('match found!');
}

Otherwise, it’s fairly easy to create a regular expression from a string:

function createRegex(pattern) {
    pattern = pattern.replace(/'/g, '.+');
    pattern = pattern.replace(/ /g, '\\s?');
    pattern = pattern.replace(/(and|&|&|\+)/ig, '(and|&|&|\\+)');
    return new RegExp(pattern, 'gi');
}

var customRegex = createRegex('David & the Smokey Sea Horses!');
if (some_str.match(customRegex)) {
    alert('match found!');
}