Question

I have this beautiful function, but I need to customize it to return just an array of items matching the regex. so the result would be #hash1234, #sweetthing,#something_notimportant Is there any way to do this using this function?

String.prototype.parseHashtag = function() {
    return this.replace(/[#]+[A-Za-z0-9-_]+/g, function(t) {
        var tag = t.replace("#", "%23");
        return t.link("http://search.twitter.com/search?q=" + tag);
    });
};

var string = '#hash1234 this is another hash: #sweetthing and yet another #something_notimportant';       
$('#result').html(string.parseHashtag());

Answer 1

The .match method returns an array of all matches, or null if there were no matches.

So if null is an acceptable return for the no-match situation then:

String.prototype.parseHashtag = function() {
    return this.match(/[#]+[A-Za-z0-9-_]+/g);
}

Or if you’d prefer to return an empty array or other default for no-match:

String.prototype.parseHashtag = function() {
    return this.match(/[#]+[A-Za-z0-9-_]+/g) || [];
}