Regular expression for wild card search in javascript

Question

I have a string as SEARCH0000123456 and SEARCH000096834 and a I want to perform below search using wildcard *

1. SEARC*2*6 - should match SEARCH0000123456
2. SEARC*9* - should match SEARCH000096834
3. *123* - should match SEARCH0000123456
4. *834 - should match SEARCH000096834

So, * is the wildcard which should match any character.

Is there any way we can achieve this using regular expression in javascript

Thanks

Answer 1

Just replace * with .* to match zero or more characters in regex. Or .+ to match one or more characters. And also add anchors, because SEARC*2*6 glob pattern will match the strings only if it's starts with SEARC, so we need to use a starting anchor ^ here.

SEARC*2*6   - ^SEARC.*2.*6$
SEARC*9*    - ^SEARC.*9.*
*123*       - .*123.*
*834        - .*834$
SE.ARC*2*6  - ^SE\.ARC.*2.*6$
?E.ARC*2*6  - ^.E\.ARC.*2.*6$

Answer 2

Mozilla have a good introduction to JS regex: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions

You just need to use .* to match 0 or more characters.

You may want .*? to match non-greedily (as in e.g. .*?345 stop at the first instance of '345', not the last). `