Including Separator Characters In Split (javascript)

This is a textarea. The user can write anything. First sentence. Second sentence? Third sentence! Fourth sentence. Fifth sentence At t

Solution 1:

Use .match instead (docs). When you use it with a /.../g-type regex, it returns an array of all matches. You just need to modify your regex first:

var sentences = $('#text').val().match(/[^\r\n.!?]+(\r\n|\r|\n|[.!?])\s*/gi);

​http://jsfiddle.net/kEHhA/3/

Solution 2:

var re = /[^\r\n.!?]+(:?(:?\r\n|[\r\n]|[.!?])+|$)/gi;
("First sentence.. Second sentence?? Third sentence!!\n"+ "Fourth sentence").match(re).map($.trim)
//["First sentence..", "Second sentence??", "Third sentence!!", "Fourth sentence"]

Solution 3:

Does this work for your purposes? It looks like you're already using jQuery but if not it should be easy to modify:

var sentences = [];
$.each($('#text').val().split(/([^\.\?\!\r\n]+.)\s/gi), function(i, sentence) {
  if(i%2 !== 0) {
    sentences.push(sentence)
  }
});
// sentences = ["First sentence.", "Second sentence?", "Third sentence!", "Fourth sentence."]

Edit: Blazemonger's solution is similar but more elegant, using match() instead of split() and therefore not needing the second step of removing the odd elements in the array.

Solution 4:

what about

var sentences = $('#text').val().split(/\r\n|\r|\n|\s/gi);

Solution 5:

It would be easy with look-behinds, but since JavaScript does not support it, my suggestion would be:

Find the white space characters you want to split on and replace them with some dummy character. Then split on that character.

Something like:

$('#text').val().replace(/\r\n|\r|\n|([.!?])\s/gi, '$1\0').split(/\0/g);​​​​​

Edit: Apparently there are better solutions which don't rely on split. I will leave this as alternative however.