Question

I’m trying to get this regexp to return, and only return "flies a"

s = 'test <!-- flies are little birds --> end';
alert(s.match(/f(.*)a/));

Why does this return

flies a
lies

How can I make the f and a obligatory?

Thank you

Answer 1

.match returns an array. The first element is the whole matched text and each other element is the content of a capture group. You have one capture group, so the second element is the text captured by it.

Either remove the group or just ignore the other elements in the array. You have to access the first one in any case:

var match = s.match(/f(.*)a/)[0]; // or /f.*a/

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P.S.: alert is a bad debugging tool, use console.log or console.dir instead.