How to find indices of all occurrences of one string in another in JavaScript?
var str = "I learned to play the Ukulele in Lebanon."
var regex = /le/gi, result, indices = [];
while ( (result = regex.exec(str)) ) {
indices.push(result.index);
}
UPDATE
I failed to spot in the original question that the search string needs to be a variable. I've written another version to deal with this case that uses indexOf
, so you're back to where you started. As pointed out by Wrikken in the comments, to do this for the general case with regular expressions you would need to escape special regex characters, at which point I think the regex solution becomes more of a headache than it's worth.
function getIndicesOf(searchStr, str, caseSensitive) {
var searchStrLen = searchStr.length;
if (searchStrLen == 0) {
return [];
}
var startIndex = 0, index, indices = [];
if (!caseSensitive) {
str = str.toLowerCase();
searchStr = searchStr.toLowerCase();
}
while ((index = str.indexOf(searchStr, startIndex)) > -1) {
indices.push(index);
startIndex = index + searchStrLen;
}
return indices;
}
var indices = getIndicesOf("le", "I learned to play the Ukulele in Lebanon.");
document.getElementById("output").innerHTML = indices + "";
<div id="output"></div>
Here is regex free version:
function indexes(source, find) {
if (!source) {
return [];
}
// if find is empty string return all indexes.
if (!find) {
// or shorter arrow function:
// return source.split('').map((_,i) => i);
return source.split('').map(function(_, i) { return i; });
}
var result = [];
for (i = 0; i < source.length; ++i) {
// If you want to search case insensitive use
// if (source.substring(i, i + find.length).toLowerCase() == find) {
if (source.substring(i, i + find.length) == find) {
result.push(i);
}
}
return result;
}
indexes("I learned to play the Ukulele in Lebanon.", "le")
EDIT: and if you want to match strings like 'aaaa' and 'aa' to find [0, 2] use this version:
function indexes(source, find) {
if (!source) {
return [];
}
if (!find) {
return source.split('').map(function(_, i) { return i; });
}
var result = [];
var i = 0;
while(i < source.length) {
if (source.substring(i, i + find.length) == find) {
result.push(i);
i += find.length;
} else {
i++;
}
}
return result;
}
You sure can do this!
//make a regular expression out of your needle
var needle = 'le'
var re = new RegExp(needle,'gi');
var haystack = 'I learned to play the Ukulele';
var results = new Array();//this is the results you want
while (re.exec(haystack)){
results.push(re.lastIndex);
}
Edit: learn to spell RegExp
Also, I realized this isn't exactly what you want, as lastIndex
tells us the end of the needle not the beginning, but it's close - you could push re.lastIndex-needle.length
into the results array...
Edit: adding link
@Tim Down's answer uses the results object from RegExp.exec(), and all my Javascript resources gloss over its use (apart from giving you the matched string). So when he uses result.index
, that's some sort of unnamed Match Object. In the MDC description of exec, they actually describe this object in decent detail.