Javascript regular expression - string to RegEx object

Question

I am sure its something pretty small that I am missing but I haven\'t been able to figure it out.

I have a JavaScript variable with the regex pattern in it but I can

Answer 1

Backslashes are special characters in strings that need to be escaped with another backslash:

var value = "someone@something.com";
var pattern = "^\\w+@[a-zA-Z_]+?\\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}$"
var re = new RegExp(pattern);
re.test(value);