Question

I started learning regular expression recently. I have a small problem statement now.

I am having a pattern like this

var pattern = /^(?:hawaian(?:beach|pizza|hotel))$/gim;
var text = "hawaian hotel is near hawaian beach. In the hawaian hotel they sell hawaian pizza";

I want to actually match hawaian hotel, hawaian beach and hawaian pizza in this text.

But the pattern is returning true only for conditions like hawaianhotel || hawaianbeach || hawaianpizza.

So i tried like this

 var text = "hawaianhotel is near hawaianbeach. In the hawaianhotel they sell hawaianpizza";

But this is also not working.

Only this one is working

var matches = pattern.exec('hawaian*');

Answer 1

Your pattern uses beginning and end of string anchors, so you would only match strings if the pattern matches the entire string. Remove the ^ and $ and you should be okay. Note that I also added a space so that you can match “hawaian hotel” instead of “hawaianhotel”.

var pattern = /(?:hawaian (?:beach|pizza|hotel))/gim;