Javascript Regex Part 3 More Character Matching

Negated character set

Negated character sets are a set of characters you do not want to match. To create a negated character set you place ^ after the opening bracket. Here is an example:

let mySample = "Hello"
let myRegex = /[^aeiou]/gi
let result  = mySample.match(myRegex)

console.log(result) // [ 'H', 'l', 'l' ]

Match characters that occur 0 or more times

To search for characters that occur 0 or more times you use an * after the word:

let happy = "yessssss"
let myRegex = /yes/
let myRegex2 = /yes*/
happy.match(myRegex) //'yes'
happy.match(myRegex2) // 'yessssss'

Match characters that occur 1 or more times

You can also match characters that occur 1 or more times using the + symbol after the word:

let happy = "aabc"
let myRegex = /a/
let myRegex2 = /a+/
happy.match(myRegex) //'a'
happy.match(myRegex2) //'aa'

Lazy matching

A lazy match finds the smallest part of the string that satisfies the regex pattern.

To use lazy matching put a ? after the characters you are searching for:

let happy = "basketball"
let myRegex = /b[a-k]l/ // not lazy matching or 'greedy matching'
let myRegex2 = /b[a-k]l?/ //lazy matching
happy.match(myRegex) //'bal'
happy.match(myRegex2) //'ba'