string search in javascript not able to find the present string

Question

This works :

var str ='<input id="a_49519498" type="radio" name="answers[10903336]" value="49519498" />cat,dog       ';

if(str.search('cat,dog')!=-1)
    {
    alert("found ");
    }

While this does not :

var str ='<input id="a_49519498" type="radio" name="answers[10903336]" value="49519498" />Rock (Foreigner, Nickelback, etc...)       ';

if(str.search('Rock (Foreigner, Nickelback, etc...)')!=-1)
    {
    alert("found ");
    }

I am guessing that this has something to do with the brackets that are present in

(Foreigner, Nickelback, etc...)

Why is JavaScript unable to find this string ? How can I make it work?

Felix Kling · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-04 23:54:41Z

3

It seems .search ^[MDN] converts the argument into a regular expression:

If a non-RegExp object obj is passed, it is implicitly converted to a RegExp by using new RegExp(obj).

The parenthesis are then interpreted as capture group and not taken literally.

It seems you don't want to use regular expressions, so you could just use .indexOf ^[MDN] instead:

if(str.indexOf('Rock (Foreigner, Nickelback, etc...)') != -1)

answered Sep 4, 2012 at 23:54

Felix Kling

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Mark Pieszak - Trilon.io · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-04 23:54:20Z

2

You need to do add escapes before your paranthesis, normally it would be 1 paranthesis, but in this case the () create a group so we need to use \\ two.

\\(
\\)

str.search('Rock \\(Foreigner, Nickelback, etc...\\)')

jsFiddle Demo

answered Sep 4, 2012 at 23:54

Mark Pieszak - Trilon.io

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2 Comments

rajat Over a year ago

i can't add those i am dynamically extracting the data from a webpage

Mark Pieszak - Trilon.io Over a year ago

You need to simply look through look through the string before you do your search for ( or ) and replace them with \\( and \\) before you do your .search()

Ethan Brown · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-04 23:55:28Z

1

String.search searches for a regular expression, not a string literal (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/search). Just escape your parentheses:

str.search('Rock \\(Foreigner, Nickelback, etc...\\)'

answered Sep 4, 2012 at 23:55

Ethan Brown

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