Question

This is probably a very easy question to answer, but I haven’t figure out what is the correct way to do it.

I need to match a text via regular expressions using ^ and $ to only match elements starting and finishing with that string. However, I need to be able to do that using a variable:

var name // some variable
var re = new RegExp(name,"g");

So I’d like to match every string that includes completely (from beginning to end) my variable name, but I don’t want to match strings containing at some place my variable name.

How can I do it?

Thanks

Answer 1

var strtomatch = "something";
var name = '^something$';
var re = new RegExp(name,"gi");
document.write(strtomatch.match(re));

The i is for ignoring case.
This matches just word “something” and will not match somethingelse.

if you are looking to match it in the middle of a sentence, you should use the following in your code

var name = ' something ';

Alernately, using word boundaries,

var name = '\\bsomething\\b';

Working Example