Javascript split regex question

Question

hello I am trying what I thought would be a rather easy regex in Javascript but is giving me lots of trouble. I want the ability to split a date via javascript splitting either by a '-','.','/' and ' '.

var date = "02-25-2010";
var myregexp2 = new RegExp("-."); 
dateArray = date.split(myregexp2);

What is the correct regex for this any and all help would be great.

Answer 1

You need the put the characters you wish to split on in a character class, which tells the regular expression engine "any of these characters is a match". For your purposes, this would look like:

date.split(/[.,/ -]/)

Although dashes have special meaning in character classes as a range specifier (ie [a-z] means the same as [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz]), if you put it as the last thing in the class it is taken to mean a literal dash and does not need to be escaped.

To explain why your pattern didn't work, /-./ tells the regular expression engine to match a literal dash character followed by any character (dots are wildcard characters in regular expressions). With "02-25-2010", it would split each time "-2" is encountered, because the dash matches and the dot matches "2".