Emulating SQL LIKE in JavaScript

Question

How can I emulate the SQL keyword LIKE in JavaScript?

For those of you who don\'t know what LIKE is, it\'s a very simple regex which only s

Answer 1

What you have will work as long as you first escape the regex characters in your pattern. Below is one example from Simon Willison’s blog:

RegExp.escape = function(text) {
  if (!arguments.callee.sRE) {
    var specials = [
      '/', '.', '*', '+', '?', '|',
      '(', ')', '[', ']', '{', '}', '\\'
    ];
    arguments.callee.sRE = new RegExp(
      '(\\' + specials.join('|\\') + ')', 'g'
    );
  }
  return text.replace(arguments.callee.sRE, '\\$1');
}

You could then implement your code as:

likeExpr = RegExp.escape(likeExpr);
var match = new RegEx(likeExpr.replace("%", ".*").replace("_", ".")).exec(str) != null;