Question

I have the string SUM([A2:A10],[B2:B10],[C2:C10],[D2:D10]) and I need to get the elements [A2:A10],[B2:B10],[C2:C10],[D2:D10] in an array, so I used match() in js. The code snippet is

var formula = "SUM([A2:A10],[B2:B10],[C2:C10],[D2:D10])";
var reg = /\[(a-zA-Z0-9)+\]/;
matches = formula.match(reg);

But I am not getting the match. I hope the regular expression is wrong. I am very poor in building regular expression. What will be the correct regular expression?

Answer 1

Try it like this:

var formula = 'SUM([A2:A10],[B2:B10],[C2:C10],[D2:D10])';
var reg = /\[\w+:\w+\]/g;
matches = formula.match(reg);

Output:

["[A2:A10]", "[B2:B10]", "[C2:C10]", "[D2:D10]"]

Your regex was in the right direction, but didn’t include the colon and captured individual characters. The \w escape sequence I used is a shortcut for a word character ([a-zA-Z0-9_]), makes it more readable. The g flag is necessary to get all matches instead of just the first one.