I have a regular expression, which matches exact words, if space is in between, it returns false. How can i achieve this? even though I have a space in between or not it has to return true. EX:

var str1 = "This is a fruit";
var str2 = "this is afruit";

str2 = str2.toLowerCase();

if(str2.toLowerCase().match(/a fruit/)){
  alert("matched");
  return true;
} 
return false;

In the above if condition, I have mentioned .match(/a fruit/) it wil return me false because i'm considering space too. I dont want to do like this. Enven if it is "a fruit" or "afruit" it has to return me true. I'm new to regular expression Please help.. I'm stuck here.

I have a regular expression, which matches exact words, if space is in between, it returns false. How can i achieve this? even though I have a space in between or not it has to return true. EX:

var str1 = "This is a fruit";
var str2 = "this is afruit";

str2 = str2.toLowerCase();

if(str2.toLowerCase().match(/a fruit/)){
  alert("matched");
  return true;
} 
return false;

In the above if condition, I have mentioned .match(/a fruit/) it wil return me false because i'm considering space too. I dont want to do like this. Enven if it is "a fruit" or "afruit" it has to return me true. I'm new to regular expression Please help.. I'm stuck here.

• javascript
• regex

• do you want to match any sequence of letters or only "afruit"? – hd1 Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 5:48
• You are using toLowerCase() twice for str2 - not really necessary... Also - you can use /regex/i to match case-insensitive. – Dror Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 5:55

4 Answers 4

/a ?fruit/

or, prettier,

/a\s?fruit/

? means that the previous character is optional. \s is any kind of whitespace.

According to Javascript regular expressions reference:

str2 = str2.toLowerCase();
does_it_match = str2.match(/[a-z ]+/);
if (does_it_match) { return true; }
return false;

var str1 = "This is a fruit";
var str2 = "this is afruit";


str1 = str1.replace(/\s/g, '');
str2 = str2.replace(/\s/g, '');

This will remove white spaces from string. then convert both into lower case and pare as you are.

Use Below Example

var str1 = "This is a fruit";
var str2 = "this is afruit";

str2 = str2.toLowerCase();
var matchString = 'a fruit';
matchString = matchString.replace(/\s+/g,'');
if(str2.toLowerCase().match(matchString)){
  alert("matched");
  return true;
} 
return false;