Question

I have the following which works fine, allowing a form field to be valid if blank or containing the word “hello” or passing the other validation…

var re = new RegExp(/^$|^[hello]|^([FG]?\d{5}|\d{5}[AB])$/);

but I want to make the word “hello” be the value of a variable.

I have tried this but it no longer seems to work:

var i = "hello";
var re = new RegExp('/^$|^['+i+']|^([FG]?\d{5}|\d{5}[AB])$/');

Answer 1

There are several things wrong in your code.

• RegExp expects a string, not a regex literal like you pass in the first case. It seems that RegExp is smart enough though and detects that you are passing a regex literal. So your first example works by coincidence and is the same as:

  var re = /^$|^[hello]|^([FG]?\d{5}|\d{5}[AB])$/;
  

• The / are not part of the expression, they are the delimiters to denote a regex literal, much like quotation marks (') indicate a string literal. Hence, if you pass the expression as string to RegExp, it should not contain /.

• Since the backslash is the escape character in strings as well, in order to create a literal backslash for the expression you have to escape it: \\.

• [hello] does not test for for the word hello, it matches either h, e, l or o, thus it is equivalent to [ehlo].

With all that said, your code should be:

var i = "hello";
var re = new RegExp('^$|^'+i+'|^([FG]?\\d{5}|\\d{5}[AB])$');