Question

I have the following text:

var text= 
    "The sad sad man uses a bat to swing the bats 
    away from his sad garden .
    Sadly he doesn't succeed. "

Let’s say i want to search for the word "sad".

var match;
re = /sad/g,
    match;
while (match = re.exec(text)) {
    console.log(match); 
match.poz = ....
}

How can i make match.poz to be a tuple(array) like this [line,position on the collumn] all starting from 0,0 ?

Eg.

• 1 match –> match.poz = [0,4]
• 2 match –> match.poz = [0,8]
• 3 match –> match.poz = [1,14]
• 4 match –> match.poz = [2,0]

Answer 1

I was able to build a simple parser, instead of using a regex, which I don’t think is possible (without a lot of help) to get the position in Javascript. All this does is go through the line, one character at a time, and “peek” ahead to see if the current position gives either sad or \n.

var text = "The sad sad man uses a bat to swing the bats \naway from his sad garden .\nSadly he doesn't succeed.",
    length = text.length,
    matches = [],
    lines = 0,
    pos = 0;

for (var i = 0; i < length; i++){
    var word = text.substring(i, i + 3).toLowerCase();

    if (word == 'sad') {
        matches[matches.length] = [lines, pos];
    }

    if (word.indexOf('\n') == 0) {
        lines++;
        pos = 0;
    } else {
        pos++;
    }
}

console.log(matches);

Which gives me the following in Firebug console:

[[0, 4], [0, 8], [1, 14], [2, 0]]

http://jsfiddle.net/Zx5CK/1/