Javascript to search string and return number of matches

Question

I have a string with a variety of html tags in it. For example:

var str = "<div>My text is <a> here</a> and it is <a> very wonderful</a>.  For an example of how very great <a> my text is</a>. Please have a look</div>"

I would like to use javascript string.replace() to replace only the words that are not inside of a tag (anchor in this case). It will also depend on user input, so I need to include a variable in the RegExp. I am testing first with string.match(); to verify that I only get one match.

I borrowed the code from javascript regex replace some words with links, but not within existing links and just switched .replace to .match. so I use the following code:

var word = "very";
var regex = new RegExp("/" + word + "(?![^<]*?<\/a>)/g");
console.log(str.match(regex).length);

It returns to me TypeError: titleText.match(...) is null which suggests to me that no matches are found. If I build it like this, however:

console.log(str.match("/very(?![^<]*?<\/a>)/g").length);

I get the expected number of results; in this case, 1;

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Don't include the slashes when building up the regex as a string:

var regex = new RegExp(word + "(?![^<]*?<\/a>)","g");