I apologise in advance for the poor title of this post.

I'm trying to match any word which contains a certain string of characters i.e. if I wanted to match any words which contained the string 'press' then I would want the following returned from my search,

• press
• expression
• depression
• pressure

So far I have this /press\w+/ which matches the word and any following charachers but I don't know how to get the preceding characters.

Many thanks

I apologise in advance for the poor title of this post.

I'm trying to match any word which contains a certain string of characters i.e. if I wanted to match any words which contained the string 'press' then I would want the following returned from my search,

• press
• expression
• depression
• pressure

So far I have this /press\w+/ which matches the word and any following charachers but I don't know how to get the preceding characters.

Many thanks

• javascript
• regex

Share Improve this question Follow asked May 12, 2010 at 12:06 screenm0nkeyscreenm0nkey 18.9k1818 gold badges6262 silver badges7575 bronze badges

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2 Answers 2

Sorted by: Reset to default 5

Try

 /\w*press\w*/

* is "zero or more", where as + is "one or more". Your original regex wouldn't match just "press".

See also

• regular-expressions.info/Repetition

Since your certain string of characters may not be known at pilation time, here is a function that does the work on any string:

function findMatchingWords(t, s) {
    var re = new RegExp("\\w*"+s+"\\w*", "g");
    return t.match(re);
}

findMatchingWords("a pressed expression produces some depression of pressure.", "press");
// -> ['pressed','expression','depression','pressure']