regexp help

[jman]

trying to search thru a string that's delimited by '|'.
would like to iterate over each one in the list

var teststr= "|aaa|bbb|";

var re = /\|(.*)\|/g;

var results = re.exec(teststr);

if ( results != null )
{
for ( var i = 1; i < results.length; ++i )
alert("[" + results[i] + "]");
}
would like to see 'aaa' and then 'bbb'

does not work - help!

[Janwillem Borleffs]

jman wrote:

var re = /\|(.*)\|/g;

This is too general, you should limit the wildcard to exclude pipes with
[^|]+; this way, you can even omit the pipe matches.
for ( var i = 1; i < results.length; ++i )
alert("[" + results[i] + "]");
}

If you want to use exec() to iterate through all the matches, you should
apply a while loop:

var teststr = "|aaa|bbb|";
var re = /([^|]+)/g;

while ((results = re.exec(teststr)) != null) {
alert(results[1]);
}

However, String.match() can be used as illustrated in your code:

var teststr = "|aaa|bbb|";
var re = /([^|]+)/g;
var results = teststr.match(re);

if (results != null) {
// iterate through matches
}

JW