Question

I want to create a regular expression for detecting the publication date for a book in Amazon. I’m extracting the data for all items and I want to find a publication’s date. All of these has this structure:
Month day, year.

The month is only represented by 3 chars, and the day could have one or two numbers (e.g Dec 5, 2011 or Dec 22, 2011). The year always have 4 numbers.

How I can do a regex in JavaScript to find this?

Thanks in advance !!

Answer 1

This:

var myregexp = /([a-z]{3}) (\d{1,2}), (\d{4})/i;
var match = myregexp.exec(subject);
if (match != null) {
    result = match[1];
}

will get you going. match[1] hold months, match[2] days and match[3] years.

I will omit explaining the regex. I leave it as an exercise to you. You should visit the infamous regex tutorial here.