Regular expression to get all words inside specific patterns (% %)

Question

All I want is this:

The sentences will have some words within % % and I want to extract all of them.

For e.g.

"This is a %varA% and %varB% and that one is a %VarC%"

and when I run it through the Javascript exec I'd like to get %varA%, %varB%, and %varC% in an array.

What would the pattern be? I've tried a number of iterations and none of them gets me each word separately. VarA and VarB etc. will all be words with just a-Z and 0-9, no special characters.

Solution

Use String match with /%(\w+)%/g regular expression

Explanation for /%(\w+)%/g

• % matches the character % literally
• 1st Capturing group (\w+)
  • \w+ match any word character [a-zA-Z0-9_]
    • Quantifier: + Between one and unlimited times, as many times as possible, giving back as needed [greedy]
• % matches the character % literally
• g modifier: global. All matches (don't return on first match)

var string = 'this is a %varA% and %varB% and %varC%';

var regExp = /%(\w+)%/g;

document.write(string.match(regExp));

Comments

[anubhava]

/%(\w+)%/g should work for you.