Why does my regex capture group only capture the last part of a string when it matches multiple parts?
What i tried
var test = "asdfdas ABCD EFGH";
var regex = /^\S+( [A-Z]{4})+$/;
// Also tried: /^\S+( [A-Z]{4})+$/g
// And: /^\S+( [A-Z]{4})+?$/g
var matches = test.match(regex);
I made a JSFiddle .
What i expect
The variable matches
should become the following array:
[
"asdfdas ABCD EFGH",
" ABCD",
" EFGH"
]
What i get
The variable matches
is actually this array:
[
"asdfdas ABCD EFGH",
" EFGH"
]
My thoughts
My guess is that I am missing a capture group and / or $
. Any help would be greatly appreciated. (I know I can figure out how to do this in multiple regexes, but I want to understand what's going on here.)
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1 answer
Yes, that's exactly what he does; you're not doing anything wrong. When a quantifier is given to a group, it only captures its last match, and that's all it will ever do in JavaScript. The general fix is to use multiple regex as you said, for example
var test = "asdfdas ABCD EFGH";
var match = test.match(/^\S+((?: [A-Z]{4})+)$/); // capture all repetitions
var matches = match[1].match(/ [A-Z]{4}/g); // match again to get individual ones
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