Check for string inside a string in javascript

Question

Anyway that I can check for string inside a string in javascript?

Example: If I have 2 variable

var value1 = '|1|2|3|4|5|6'
var value2 = '1|2|3'

How can I check whether value2 is found in value1?

Answer 1

var contained = (value1.indexOf(value2) != -1);

contained will be true if and only if value2 is a substring of value1.

• Ken Franqueiro: To be clear, this will return the 0-based index of the start of where value2 occurs within value1; it will return -1 if it is not found, so make sure to code any conditions accordingly. developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/…

Answer 2

'|1|2|3|4|5|6'.match(/1\|2\|3/);

Note that you need to escape the |, since they have a special meaning in Regular Expressions. If this is too much of a hassle, Matthews indexOf method is easier.

Answer 3

I like to use regular expressions and javascript's .match() method:

if(value1.match(/1\|2\|3/)) {
 // value2 is found in value1
}

.match() returns an array of the matches, or null if no matches are found.

Also note that the pipes, |, have to be escaped with a backslash, \, because they have special meaning within regular expressions. Specifically, they mean OR. So /1|2/ becomes 1 OR 2. While if we escape the | with a backslash like so:

/1\|2/

It becomes:

1|2