How to split a long regular expression into multiple lines in JavaScript?

by

Extending @KooiInc answer, you can avoid manually escaping every special character by using the source property of the RegExp object.

Example:

var urlRegex= new RegExp(''
  + /(?:(?:(https?|ftp):)?\/\/)/.source     // protocol
  + /(?:([^:\n\r]+):([^@\n\r]+)@)?/.source  // user:pass
  + /(?:(?:www\.)?([^\/\n\r]+))/.source     // domain
  + /(\/[^?\n\r]+)?/.source                 // request
  + /(\?[^#\n\r]*)?/.source                 // query
  + /(#?[^\n\r]*)?/.source                  // anchor
);

or if you want to avoid repeating the .source property you can do it using the Array.map() function:

var urlRegex= new RegExp([
  /(?:(?:(https?|ftp):)?\/\/)/      // protocol
  ,/(?:([^:\n\r]+):([^@\n\r]+)@)?/  // user:pass
  ,/(?:(?:www\.)?([^\/\n\r]+))/     // domain
  ,/(\/[^?\n\r]+)?/                 // request
  ,/(\?[^#\n\r]*)?/                 // query
  ,/(#?[^\n\r]*)?/                  // anchor
].map(function(r) {return r.source}).join(''));

In ES6 the map function can be reduced to:
.map(r => r.source)

Leave a Comment

tech