Question

I’ve inherited this javascript regex from another developer and now, even though nothing has changed, it doesn’t seem to match the required text. Here is the regex:

/^.*(already (active|exists|registered)).*$/i

I need it to match any text that looks like

stuff stuff already exists more stuff etc

It looks perfectly fine to me, it only looks for those 2 words together and should in theory ignore the rest of the string. In my script I check the text like this

var cardUsedRE = /^.*(already (active|exists|registered)).*$/i;
if(cardUsedRE.test(responseText)){
    mdiv.className = 'userError';
    mdiv.innerHTML = 'The card # has already been registered';
    document.getElementById('cardErrMsg').innerHTML = arrowGif;

}

I’ve stepped through this in FireBug and I’ve seen it fail to test this string:

> Error: <detail>Card number already registered for CLP.\n</detail>

Am I missing something? What is the likely issue with this?

Answer 1

Here’s a simplified but functionally-equivalent regex that should handle newlines:

/(already\s+(active|exists|registered))/i

Not sure why you’d ever want to lead with ^.* or end with .*$ unless your goal is specifically to prevent newlines. Otherwise it’s just superfluous.

EDIT: I replaced the space with \s+ so it will be more liberal with how it handles whitespace (e.g. one space, two spaces, a tab, etc. should all match).