How to check if a string contains text from an arr

Question

Pretty straight forward. In javascript, I need to check if a string contains any substrings held in an array.

Answer 1

For people Googling,

The solid answer should be.

const substrings = ['connect', 'ready'];
const str = 'disconnect';
if (substrings.some(v => str === v)) {
   // Will only return when the `str` is included in the `substrings`
}

Answer 2

There's nothing built-in that will do that for you, you'll have to write a function for it.

If you know the strings don't contain any of the characters that are special in regular expressions, then you can cheat a bit, like this:

if (new RegExp(substrings.join("|")).test(string)) {
    // At least one match
}

...which creates a regular expression that's a series of alternations for the substrings you're looking for (e.g., one|two) and tests to see if there are matches for any of them, but if any of the substrings contains any characters that are special in regexes (*, [, etc.), you'd have to escape them first and you're better off just doing the boring loop instead.

Gratuitous live example

---

Update:

In a comment on the question, Martin asks about the new Array#map function in ECMAScript5. map isn't all that much help, but some is:

if (substrings.some(function(v) { return str.indexOf(v) >= 0; })) {
    // There's at least one
}

Live example (Only works on modern browsers)

Mind you, it does mean some overhead, and you only have it on ECMAScript5-compliant implementations (so, not IE7 or earlier, for instance; maybe not even IE8), but still if you're really into that style of programming... (And you could use an ECMAScript5 shim, this one or any of several others.)

Answer 3

building on T.J Crowder's answer

using escaped RegExp to test for "at least once" occurrence, of at least one of the substrings.

function buildSearch(substrings) {
  return new RegExp(
    substrings
    .map(function (s) {return s.replace(/[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\]/g, '\\$&');})
    .join('{1,}|') + '{1,}'
  );
}


var pattern = buildSearch(['hello','world']);

console.log(pattern.test('hello there'));
console.log(pattern.test('what a wonderful world'));
console.log(pattern.test('my name is ...'));

Answer 4

Using underscore.js or lodash.js, you can do the following on an array of strings:

var contacts = ['Billy Bob', 'John', 'Bill', 'Sarah'];

var filters = ['Bill', 'Sarah'];

contacts = _.filter(contacts, function(contact) {
    return _.every(filters, function(filter) { return (contact.indexOf(filter) === -1); });
});

// ['John']

And on a single string:

var contact = 'Billy';
var filters = ['Bill', 'Sarah'];

_.every(filters, function(filter) { return (contact.indexOf(filter) >= 0); });

// true

Answer 5

var yourstring = 'tasty food'; // the string to check against


var substrings = ['foo','bar'],
    length = substrings.length;
while(length--) {
   if (yourstring.indexOf(substrings[length])!=-1) {
       // one of the substrings is in yourstring
   }
}

Answer 6

function containsAny(str, substrings) {
    for (var i = 0; i != substrings.length; i++) {
       var substring = substrings[i];
       if (str.indexOf(substring) != - 1) {
         return substring;
       }
    }
    return null; 
}

var result = containsAny("defg", ["ab", "cd", "ef"]);
console.log("String was found in substring " + result);