Stumped: JavaScript match method regular expression

[John La]

With this string "x | AAA BBB cc dddd ... |", where between the vertical pipes is an arbitrary combination of characters and spaces, I tried

    match(/\|[\/S ]+?\|/), which did not, and should not, match.

But then I tried

    match(/\|[\/S ]+\|/) which did not match, much to my surprise, given the greedy nature of the + quantifier.

So then I tried

    match(/\|[\/S ]+(?=\|)/), which did not match either.

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.

[Mike Simmons]

Can you describe in words what you expect

[\/S ]

to mean?  

To me, it looks like a character class that includes the characters '/' (unnecessarily escaped), 'S', and ' '.  I don't see any reason to expect why that would work here.

Perhaps you're trying to use \S to indicate a non-whitespace character?  That wouldn't work inside a character class marked with [ ].  Maybe try

match(/\|(\S| )*?\|/)

[Ron McLeod]

Maybe  /\|[^|]+\|/

I tried it in Chrome's dev mode console and it seems to workconst regex = /\|[^|]+\|/ undefined 'x | AAA BBB cc dddd ... |'.match(regex) ? 'match' : 'no match'; 'match' 'x | AAA BBB cc dddd ... '.match(regex) ? 'match' : 'no match'; 'no match' 'x  AAA BBB cc dddd ... |'.match(regex) ? 'match' : 'no match'; 'no match'

[Stephan van Hulst]

Ron McLeod wrote:'x | AAA BBB cc dddd ... |'.match(regex) ? 'match' : 'no match'; 'match'

As a side note, I think this is a wonderful example of how JavaScript's weak type system compounds with the poorly named "match" method to lead to a truly surprising result.

[John La]

Thanks all for providing clarity. I had at least two competing mistakes preventing the solution to my problem, slash-backslash being one of them. Needless to say, I've got a re-occurring problem with substr-substring methods too.

It's like learning a non-specific foreign language: it's simple, not necessarily easy.