Question

I would like to craft a case-insensitive regex (for JavaScript) that matches street names, even if each word has been abbreviated. For example:

n univ av should match N University Ave

king blv should match Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd

ne 9th should match both NE 9th St and 9th St NE

Bonus points (JK) for a “replace” regex that wraps the matched text with <b> tags.

Answer 1

You got:

"n univ av"

You want:

"\bn.*\buniv.*\bav.*"

So you do:

var regex = new RegExp("n univ av".replace(/(\S+)/g, function(s) { return "\\b" + s + ".*" }).replace(/\s+/g, ''), "gi");

Voilà!

But I’m not done, I want my bonus points. So we change the pattern to:

var regex = new RegExp("n univ av".replace(/(\S+)/g, function(s) { return "\\b(" + s + ")(.*)" }).replace(/\s+/g, ''), "gi");

And then:

var matches = regex.exec("N University Ave");

Now we got:

• matches[0] => the entire expression (useless)
• matches[odd] => one of our matches
• matches[even] => additional text not on the original match string

So, we can write:

var result = '';
for (var i=1; i < matches.length; i++)
{
  if (i % 2 == 1)
    result += '<b>' + matches[i] + '</b>';
  else
    result += matches[i];
}