Question

I took some code from here: – How do I distinguish jQuery selector strings from other strings – and modified it a bit. However, I CANNOT get the match to work correctly. I’ve tried both .test and .exec.

var htmlExpr = /^(?:[^<]*(<[\w\W]+>)[^>]*$|#([\w\-]+)$)/;
if ( selector.charAt(0) === "<" && selector.charAt( selector.length - 1 ) === ">" && selector.length >= 3 || htmlExpr.test( selector )) {
    return true;
} else {
    return false;
}

I’m using #mydiv and <div class='gallery'>gallery</div>blah as selector

Both return true.

What’s going on here that I’m missing?

Answer 1

#mydiv is returning true as you’ve specifically check for it in the regex in this part |#([\w\-]+)$ , you should eliminate that part so #mydiv doesn’t match, like this:

function isHtml(selector) {
    var htmlExpr = /^[^<]*(<[\w\W]+>)[^>]*$/;
    if ( selector.charAt(0) === "<" && selector.charAt( selector.length - 1 ) === ">" && selector.length >= 3 || htmlExpr.test( selector )) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
} 

// Demo
console.log(isHtml("#mydiv")); // false
console.log(isHtml("<div class='gallery'>gallery</div>blah")); // true