Question

I’m trying I have a string that I pass into my function from user input and I use regex to detect if there is a non-word character present in it (symbol) I want to then extract the frist character of the string in array[0] and rest in array[1] is there any way I can do this in regex, perhaps /^(zero length selector)/, I’ve tried writing my own expression but sofar having trouble getting it to work. Any Ideas?

EDIT:
I’m basically looking for a regexp that can select space between index 0 and 1 so i can split on that. So if say ‘#domElementId’ goes in [‘#’,’domElementId’] comes out.

Answer 1

Actually figured it out, ended up really easy after 2 days of learning the in’s and outs of RegExp. StackOverflow has been an indispensable help though. Anyway here is what I finally came up with.

function splitFirst(a) {
   return a.split(new RegExp('(?=\\w{'+(a.length-1)+'}$)'));
}

1. I’m declaring RegExp inside split params, reason for is that I want to pass variable into the expression.
2. I’m basically selecting zero-width selection that has look ahead, of the number of characters in string passed minus one (or any other index you want), of any character (\w).
3. I’m assembling expression as a string, thus ‘\\’ is to say litteral \w (meaning any letter any number) immediately followed by end of string.