Question

I’m trying to write a function to split a word into letters, and I’m getting a weird result:

'abc'.split(/(a|b|c)/) 

Gives:

["", "a", "", "b", "", "c", ""]

Incidentally, I see the same results in Python, so clearly the problem is me!

>>> re.split( '(a|b|c)', 'abc')
['', 'a', '', 'b', '', 'c', '']

The problem is, why are there empty strings intercalated between the letters? I expected

["a", "b", "c"]

Thanks!

Answer 1

Instead of splitting, you can do a string match with a global regex…

'abc'.match(/(a|b|c)/g); // ["a", "b", "c"]

This makes more sense since all you really care about is the match, not what’s between the match.

If you wanted to match any character from a to z, you can do this…

'abc'.match(/([a-z])/gi);

I made it case insensitive to match upper case too.