Question

I’m working on a JavaScript to extract a URL from a Google search URL, like so:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=thisisthepartiwanttofind.org&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Right now, my code looks like this:

var checkForURL = /[\w\d](.org)/i;
var findTheURL = checkForURL.exec(theURL);

I’ve ran this through a couple regex testers and it seems to work, but in practice the string I get returned looks like this:

thisisthepartiwanttofind.org,.org

So where’s that trailing ,.org coming from?

I know my pattern isn’t super robust but please don’t suggest better patterns to use. I’d really just like advice on what in particular I did wrong with this one. Thanks!

Answer 1

Remove the parentheses in the regex if you do not process the .org (unlikely since it is a literal). As per @Mark comment, add a + to match one or more characters of the class [\w\d]. Also, I would escape the dot:

var checkForURL = /[\w\d]+\.org/i;