Question

I’m trying to split a string by the following array of characters:

"!", "%", "$", "@"

I thought about using regex, so I developed the following method which I thought would split the string by the characters:

var splitted = string.split(/\!|%|\$|@*/);

However, when I run the following code, the output is split by every character, not what I was hoping for:

var toSplit = "abc%123!def$456@ghi";
var splittedArray = toSplit.split(/\!|%|\$|@*/);

How could I make it so that splittedArray contains the following elements?

"abc", "123", "def", "456", "ghi"

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

@* matches the empty string and there’s an empty string between any two characters, so the string is split at every single character. Use + instead:

/\!|%|\$|@+/

Also if you meant the + to apply to every character and not just @ then group them up:

/(\!|%|\$|@)+/

Or better yet, use a character class. This lets you omit the backslashes since none of these characters are special inside square brackets.

/[!%$@]+/