Question

I’d like to allow a user to be able to enter a list of IDs into a textarea and allow the IDs to be seperated by whitespace such as a new line as well as by commas.

Then I’d like to convert that into an int[] or throw an error if the string is bad: contains letters, decimals, etc.

But I’m having trouble working it out.

Can anyone give an example of how to do this?

I’d apprecuate any help.

Answer 1

If you use the split method, you can pass it a regular expression to split by. For example:

var myArray=myString.split(/[^\d]+/);

This would return an array of strings, each containing a string representation of an integer. Furthermore, you can then use the parseInt function to parse those string representations to integers, like so:

var myIntArray=[];
for(var i=0;i<myStringArray.length;i++) {
    myIntArray.push(parseInt(myStringArray[i], 10));
}

You can see a full example with some jQuery helpers (specifically, jQuery.map) here.