regular expresion split

[kwhubby]

Hi, I am having an anoying time with regular expresions. I am trying to split a string up were non alpha numberic characters are ( \W ) but the problem is that it removes what I want as the split point. I want to split something like "hello everybody, how are you" into the array: "hello"," ","everybody",","," ","how"," ","are"," ","you" but the problem is if i do a split were it splits, it removes that character so if i did a split for \W on "hi everybody" id get "hi","everybody" I would like to have a way to keep this character and place it in the array using regular expresions if posible.

Thanks for any help

[liorean]

There's two things you can do:
- Capture the non-alpha /(\W)/g. It will then be in the match array afterwards. The drawback with this is that only the modern browsers support it, so you need another approach if you want to support any version of ie.
- Match word boundaries, /\b/g, instead of non-alpha characters.

[kwhubby]

ah ha! thanks alot! I had tried adding the parenthesis and the multiline flag but I was using IE so I had no luck.. thanks for the other way that really helps!

[Philip M]

Originally posted by liorean
There's two things you can do:
- Capture the non-alpha /(\W)/g. It will then be in the match array afterwards. The drawback with this is that only the modern browsers support it, so you need another approach if you want to support any version of ie..

Liorean - Could you explain more please? /\W/g works fine for me in IE 5.5. It is the same as [^a-zA-Z-0-9].

[liorean]

Yes it does, but if you reread the earlier posts you will see that wasn't what problem we were talking about. The problem is this:

[color=green]// Modern browsers:[/color]
'hey there, are you awake?'.split(/(\W)/g);
    [color=green]// => [
        'hey',
        ' ',
        'there',
        ',',
        '',
        ' ',
        'are',
        ' ',
        'you',
        ' ',
        'awake',
        '?',
        ''
    ][/color]

[color=green]// Internet Explorer (any version, any platform):[/color]
'hey there, are you awake?'.split(/(\W)/g);
    [color=green]// => [
        'hey',
        'there',
        'are',
        'you',
        'awake'
    ][/color]

[color=green]// Which you can compare to this:[/color]
'hey there, are you awake?'.split(/\W/g);
    [color=green]// => [
        'hey',
        'there',
        'are',
        'you',
        'awake'
    ][/color]

Thus, you lose all non-word characters in ie.

Instead, you may use this. It's not quite the same, but it's as close as you're going to get:

'hey there, are you awake?'.split(/\b/g);
    [color=green]// => [
        'hey',
        ' ',
        'there',
        ', ',
        'are',
        ' ',
        'you',
        ' ',
        'awake',
        '?'
    ][/color]