search (string)

Task Purpose

The search task takes a regular expression (RegExp) and a string and searches for that RegExp within the string. A RegExp can contain both special and ordinary characters. The task returns an index (number) to indicate the position where a match is found. Indexing starts from zero (0). The task returns -1 if no match is found.

Potential Use Case

The search task checks if a particular string matches for a given regex, or search pattern. You could use this method simply to check if a certain pattern exists and also know its index within a string. In conjunction with the substr method, you could use search to find and replace text in a data record.

Properties

Input and output properties are shown below.

Input	Type	Description
`str`	String	Required. The string (or substring) to search.
`regexp`	String	Required. The search pattern to match in the regular expression.

Output	Type	Description
`index`	Number	The position where the first match between the regular expression and the given string is found. Returns -1 if not found. Of note, the outgoing index of the first character begins with 0, the second character 1, and so on.

Example 1

In the example shown below:

The incoming str variable is statically set. The reference variable is Hello World.
The search pattern to match in the regexp variable is or.

The index result will return 7 upon output, indicating the regexp ("or") is located at index position 7 in the string.

Example 2

In the example shown below:

The reference variable for the incoming str is Hey Dr. Livingstone.
The search pattern to match in the regexp variable is \., which is a special notation (character class) to indicate the match should be a period (".").

For more information, see: Using character classes in regular expressions

The index result returns 6 upon output, indicating the period is located at index position 6 in the string.

Example 3

In this example:

The incoming str variable is statically set. The reference variable is Hey Judey.
The regexp variable is statically set as \., a character class notation to indicate the match should be a period (".").

The index result returns -1 upon output, indicating a period was not found in the string.