How to find indices of groups in JavaScript regular expressions match?

Question

When I write a regular expression like:

var m = /(s+).*?(l)[^l]*?(o+)/.exec(\"this is hello to you\");
console.log(m);

I get a match object

Answer 1

I wrote a simple (well the initialization got a bit bloated) javascript object to solve this problem on a project I've been working on recently. It works the same way as the accepted answer but generates the new regexp and pulls out the data you requested automatically.

var exp = new MultiRegExp(/(firstBit\w+)this text is ignored(optionalBit)?/i);
var value = exp.exec("firstbitWithMorethis text is ignored");

value = {0: {index: 0, text: 'firstbitWithMore'},
         1: null};

Git Repo: My MultiRegExp. Hope this helps someone out there.

edit Aug, 2015:

Try me: MultiRegExp Live.