What is the meaning of the 'g' flag in regular expressions?

Question

What is the meaning of the g flag in regular expressions?

What is is the difference between /.+/g and /.+/?

Answer 1

As @matiska pointed out, the g flag sets the lastIndex property as well.

A very important side effect of this is if you are reusing the same regex instance against a matching string, it will eventually fail because it only starts searching at the lastIndex.

// regular regex
const regex = /foo/;

// same regex with global flag
const regexG = /foo/g;

const str = " foo foo foo ";

const test = (r) => console.log(
    r,
    r.lastIndex,
    r.test(str),
    r.lastIndex
);

// Test the normal one 4 times (success)
test(regex);
test(regex);
test(regex);
test(regex);

// Test the global one 4 times
// (3 passes and a fail)
test(regexG);
test(regexG);
test(regexG);
test(regexG);