Question

I want to check if a string is a valid javascript function call.

Could someone help me to write a regex that match to all these:

hello("hello", "world")
greet(1, "mr", "peterson");
run()

But not these:

walk()); // invalid syntax
greet(1?23\) // invalid js characters
say("hi" -) // invalid js characters

Thanks!

Answer 1

Answering the implied question from your comment:

I want to use eval() on it. But I want to check its valid js function first because I dont want to run variables or invalid strings.

If this is one of the, oh, three (or fewer) valid places where using eval isn’t a bad idea, probably better to go ahead and eval it and handle the resulting Error via a try/catch block — EvalError, SyntaxError, etc. See the spec for details of the various errors — if you care what the error is; mostly I’d think you just want to know whether there was a problem or not, e.g.:

try {
    eval(theString);
}
catch (e) {
    // Something went wrong, report it
}

But: You can (and should) almost always avoid using eval. For instance, if you want to allow someone to give you something to call that may require arguments (your hello("hello", "world")), just have them give you a function you call without arguments, and they would give you a wrapper e.g.:

callTheFunction(function() {
    hello("hello", "world");
});