Properties that contain parenthesized substring matches, if any.

Property of RegExp
Static, Read-only

Description

Because input is static, it is not a property of an individual regular expression object. Instead, you always use it as RegExp.input.

The number of possible parenthesized substrings is unlimited, but the predefined RegExp object can only hold the last nine. You can access all parenthesized substrings through the returned array's indexes.

These properties can be used in the replacement text for the String.replace method. When used this way, do not prepend them with RegExp. The example below illustrates this. When parentheses are not included in the regular expression, the script interprets $n's literally (where n is a positive integer).

Examples

The following script uses the replace method to switch the words in the string. For the replacement text, the script uses the values of the $1 and $2 properties of the global RegExp object. Note that the RegExp object name is not be prepended to the $ properties when they are passed as the second argument to the replace method.

This produces the result: "Smith, John".