- Part of the String object, JavaScript's match() method takes a regular expression as argument, and returns all matches it found in a string as array elements. Extract all numbers from a sentence:
var str = "On the 10th, all 4 employees got a $3.50/hour raise."
var arr = str.match( /\d+[\.\d]*/g ); // 'g' modifier to capture ALL matches
alert( arr.join("\n") ); // Show one match per line - click to run ->Explanations:
• Our "/\d+[\.\d]*/g" pattern, translated in plain English: "capture all numbers that contain one or more digits (\d+), optionally (*) followed by a period and one or more numbers (\.\d)".
• Without using the 'g' global modifier, only the first number would have been captured .
• match() stored each new matching string into an array, which we saved into the arr variable.
• We used the join() method to display one element per line (does not modify the original array). - You can use this method to count the number of string occurring in another string: here's a short example that ensure that we used at least 3 numbers in a sentence. Notice that we are directly extracting the length of the (anonymous) returned array, without storing it into a variable:
var str = "On the 10th, all 4 employees got a $3.50/hour raise.";
if( ( str.match(/\d+[\.\d]*/g)).length < 3 )
alert("You have not used enough numbers!");
else
alert("Thanks for using at least 3 numbers."); - The PHP equivalent to JavaScript's match() method is the preg_match_all() function:
$str = 'On the 10th, all 4 employees got a $3.50/hour raise.';
// No 'g' modifier needed: this function auto-captures all matches:
preg_match_all( '/\d+[\.\d]*/', $str, $arr );
// Array of matches found stored inside $arr[0]
// Use count() function to get the length of that sub-array:
echo 'We found ' . count($arr[0]) . ' numbers in that string';
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