Idea: Retrieve a Word from a string using one of the letters in that word

[Sandfordc]

I have tried several time to do this but have been unsucessful.
I tried something like:

myFunction(char ater)

str=frm.s1.valu e
sb1=str.substri ng(0,charater)
sb2=str.substri ng(charater,str .length)
//looping function to find nearest space on left side
for(parameters) {
sbs1=str.indexO f(' ')
}
//found the space on the right no problem
sb2=str.indexOf (' ')

this is about as far as i got. Anyone that can help?

Best Regards,
Sandfordc
www.JavaScript-Central.tk

[Random]

Lasse Reichstein Nielsen wrote:

"Random" <ra*******@gmai l.com> writes:

I just assumed \b\S* would provide the closest thing to the behavior he
expected, because the \b would handle some punctuation. But I agree
about \w.

It's also worth remembering that \b is defined in terms of "word
characters" (\b matches a zero-width position where there is a word
character on one side and not the other), and \w matches exactly a
word character, so
"\\b\\w*" + Char + "\\w*\b"
should match a word containing the Char (assuming that Char contains
a word character. If it isn't, then it might need to be escaped,
something like:

"\\b\\w*" + (/^\w$/.test(Char) ? Char : "\\"+Char) + "\\w*\b"

/L
--
Lasse Reichstein Nielsen - lr*@hotpop.com
DHTML Death Colors: <URL:http://www.infimum.dk/HTML/rasterTriangleD OM.html>
'Faith without judgement merely degrades the spirit divine.'

Excellent points.

Curious, I checked it out. In my example of leftWordfromCha r():
Checking For Gave
test e test
test ing e test
test, ing e test
test!ing e test!ing
test! ing e test
test,ing e test,ing
test-ing e test-ing
-test- e test
_test_ e _test_
,test, e test
t(es)t-ing e t(es)t-ing
test ing \s test ing
test\ning \n test\ning (where \n = newline in all three)
test\ning \\n test\ning (where \n = newline in Checking and
Gave)

-- which made me realise that I didn't bother to check whether Char is
actually a single character. Guess I should have called it
leftWordfromStr ing.

Points being: some unpredictable behaviour may result, at the expense
of a broader definition of a 'word', something I probably should have
noted; escaping should be added if it is desired, something I
definitely should have pointed out.

Perhaps a better definition of a 'word' would be:
\w*(\w+[-']{1})*\w+

That would expand the definition of a 'word' to include contractions
and complex words (hyphenated), but would also match substrings
containing (but not terminated by) multiple non-sequential apostrophes.
In some cases, words may also begin or end with apostrophes ('Tis,
'til, an', et cetera) to indicate truncation-- this RE wouldn't match
the apostrophe. I don't think that last one can be accounted for.

[Random]

Random wrote:

Perhaps a better definition of a 'word' would be:
\w*(\w+[-']{1})*\w+

The {1} is redundant.