Question

I’m new to regex and having difficulty with some basic stuff.

var name = "robert johnson";
var searchTerm = "robert johnson";

if (searchTerm.match(name)) {
    console.log("MATCH");
}

I’d like to try and find something that matches any of the following:

rob, robert, john, johnson, robertjohnson

To make the regex simpler, I’ve already added a .toLowerCase() to both the “name” and the “searchTerm” vars.

What regex needs to be added to searchTerm.match(name) to make this work?

Clarification: I’m not just trying to get a test to pass with the 5 examples I gave, I’m trying to come up with some regex where any of those tests will pass. So, for example:

searchTerm.match(name)

…needs to change to something like:

searchTerm.match("someRegexVoodooHere"+name+"someMoreRegexVoodooHere")

So, if I edit

var searchTerm = "robert johnson";

…to be

var searchTerm = "rob";

…the same function searchTerm.match directive would work.

Again, I’m new to regex so I hope I’m asking this clearly. Basically I need to write a function that takes any searchTerm (it’s not included here, but elsewhere I’m requiring that at least 3 characters be entered) and can check to see if those 3 letters are found, in sequence, in a given string of “firstname lastname”.

Answer 1

"robert johnson".match(/\b(john(son)?|rob(ert(johnson)?)?)\b/)

Will give you all possible matches (there are more then one, if you need to find whether the input string contained any of the words.

/\b(john(son)?|rob(ert(johnson)?)?)\b/.test("robert johnson")

will return true if the string has any matches. (better to use this inside a condition, because you don’t need to find all the matches).

• \b – means word boundary.
• () – capturing group.
• ? – quantifier “one or none”.
• | – logical “or”.