Comments on: Beginner to Beginner: Splitting strings into arrays in Javascript

By: davidw

davidw — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:40:39 +0000

Karl, of course you can quote me. I’m pleased. Feel free to link back to this post, but it’s totally up to you.

– David W.

By: Karl Arthur

Karl Arthur — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 02:36:43 +0000

Hey David,
Do you mind if I use “all explanations are approximate” as a tagline for my blog? (I’d have to translate it to Norwegian.) It seems to capture something. I won’t credit you, as that would be quoting you out of context, and leave you wide open to accusations of adopting a relativist epistemology too. And I won’t take it personally if you say no, but I probably won’t buy your next book either. Nice work on the article above this, btw, I think professor Peterson has her adjectives and her nouns mixed up.
Cheers, Karl Arthur

By: davidw

davidw — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:53:47 +0000

Thanks, Seth. Joel thought “split” might take a regex, but the quick cheat sheet we consulted (we weren’t online so we used the one in the IDE I use) didn’t mention it.

Joel’s has the advantage of retaining the info about which delimiter was used, which is of particular importance when you’re dealing with something like a simple boolean query, which was exactly what I wanted.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:42:39 +0000

/(I am confused) ^ (you are in error)/

You say:

“but the split method only lets you specify one delimiter.”

However, the documentation states:

“Specifies the character, regular expression, or substring that is used to determine where to split the string”

Multiple delimiters should be able to be handled with a regular expression. That is, roughly

/OR|AND/

More complicated (use boundaries):

/\s*\bOR\b\s*|\s*\bAND\s*\b/