Regular Expression Match Groups

By  on  

Regular expressions are incredibly powerful but can be difficult to maintain. They're a skill you learn on the job and, when the suits walk by, make you look incredibly smart if you have a few up on your screen. How can we solve the maintainability problem? With a match groups, as Addy Osmani enlightened me about last week:

https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/1386031624232456194

Look at the ?<descriptor> pattern, with the descriptor being a meaningful name that you want to give to a give group. With the group usage, you can more intelligently handle match results:

const re = /(?\d{4})-(?\d{2})-(?\d{2})/;
const result = re.exec('2021-04-26');

// Deconstructing from result.groups
const { year, month, day } = result.groups;

// Using array syntax
const [, year, month, day] = result;

The only real downside of using this strategy is that most developers probably don't know about it. You could also complain that it makes the regular expression longer. In the end, however, maintainability rules the day, and I love that Addy shared this tip with us!

Recent Features

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Simple Dojo Accordion

    Let's be honest:  even though we all giggle about how cheap of a thrill JavaScript accordions have become on the web, they remain an effective, useful widget.  Lots of content, small amount of space.  Dojo's Dijit library provides an incredibly simply method by which you can...

  • By
    MooTools Window Object Dumping

    Ever want to see all of the information stored within the window property of your browser? Here's your chance. The XHTML We need a wrapper DIV that we'll consider a console. The CSS I like making this look like a command-line console. The MooTools JavaScript Depending on what you have loaded...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!