Question

One of the jQuery Core Style Guidelines indicate:

All RegExp operations should be done using .test() and .exec().
“string”.match() is no longer used.

Why is match() not favoured?

Answer 1

Because .exec is simply a better version of .match

Let’s see

var ret1 = string.match(regexp);
var ret2 = regexp.exec(string);

If regexp is a non global regular expression then the return values are the same.

However if regexp is a global regular expression (/foo/g) then match just returns an array of matches and that’s it. No extra meta data like exec would return!