Dynamically creating RegExp objects

console.log(/[0-9]/.test("in 1992")); // → true

Within square brackets, a hyphen (-) between two characters can be used to indicate a range of characters, where the ordering is determined by the character’s Unicode number. Characters 0 to 9 sit right next to each other in this ordering (codes 48 to 57), so [0-9] covers all of them and matches any digit.

A number of common character groups have their own built-in shortcuts. Digits are one of them: \d means the same thing as [0-9]. \d Any digit character \w An alphanumeric character (“word character”) \s Any whitespace character (space, tab, newline, and similar) \D A character that is not a digit \W A nonalphanumeric character \S A nonwhitespace character

. Any character except for newline

So you could match a date and time format like 01-30-2003 15:20 with the following expression:

let dateTime = /\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\d\d \d\d:\d\d/; console.log(dateTime.test("01-30-2003 15:20")); // → true console.log(dateTime.test("30-jan-2003 15:20")); // → false

That looks completely awful, doesn’t it? Half of it is backslashes, producing a background noise that makes it hard to spot the actual pattern expressed. We’ll see a slightly improved version of this expression later.

These backslash codes can also be used inside square brackets. For example, [\d.] means any digit or a period character. But the period itself, between square brackets, loses its special meaning. The same goes for other special characters, such as + .

To invert a set of characters—that is, to express that you want to match any character except the ones in the set—you can write a caret (^) character after the opening bracket.

let notBinary = /[^01]/;

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