Non-standard
This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track. Do not use it on production sites facing the Web: it will not work for every user. There may also be large incompatibilities between implementations and the behavior may change in the future.
The non-standard lastMatch property is a static and read-only property of regular expressions that contains the last matched characters. RegExp.$&
is an alias for this property.
Description
The lastMatch
property is static, it is not a property of an individual regular expression object. Instead, you always use it as RegExp.lastMatch
or RegExp['$&'].
The value of the lastMatch
property is read-only and modified whenever a successful match is made.
You can not use the shorthand alias with the dot property accessor (RegExp.$&
), because the parser expects an expression with "&" in that case and a SyntaxError
is thrown. Use the bracket notation for property access.
Examples
Using lastMatch and $&
var re = /hi/g;
re.test('hi there!');
RegExp.lastMatch; // "hi"
RegExp['$&']; // "hi"
Specifications
Specification |
---|
Legacy RegExp features in JavaScript |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser