Javascript Regular Expression Match

Question

Try

<script type="text/javascript">
 var str=">1 people>9 people>1u people";
 document.write(str.match(/>.*people/img).length);
</script>

at http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/tryit.asp?filename=tryjsref_regexp_dot. This code should return an array of size 3 but it return array of size 1.
Where is the problem?

Answer 1

The .* part of your regexp is being "greedy" and taking as many characters as it can, in this case returning the entire string as a single match.

Write it like this instead, with a trailing ?:

str.match(/>.*?people/img)

See the section describing "?" in the Mozilla Developer Network JS Reference.