/PM regex syntax for sending message in chat-room

Question

I am working on a AJAX/PHP chatroom and am currently stuck on the regex to detect if a user has send a PM & then work out who it is too and what the message is.

If the user types something like

/pm PezCuckow Hi There you so awesome!

I would like to first test if my string matched that pattern then get 'PezCuckow' and 'Hi There you so awesome!' as strings to post to the PHP.

I have done some research on regex but really have no idea where to start with this one! Can you help?

==Thanks to everyones help this is now solved!==

var reg = /^\/pm\s+(\w+)\s+(.*)$/i;
var to = "";

if(message.match(reg)) {
    m = message.match(reg);
    to = m[1];
    message = m[2];
}

Answer 1

Hows about this:

var reg = /^\/pm\s+(\w+)\s+(.*)$/i,
    m = '/pm PezCuckow Hi There you so awesome!'.match(reg);

m[0]; // "PezCuckow"
m[1]; // "Hi There you so awesome!"

That matches "/pm" followed by whitespace " " (liberally accepting extra spaces), followed by the username \w+, followed by whitespace " " agin, then finally the message .* (which is basically everything to the end of the line).

Answer 2

This regex parses a message:

^(?:\s*/(\w+)\s*(\w*)\s*)?((?:.|[\r\n])*)$

Explanation:

^              # start-of-string
(?:            # start of non-capturing group
  \s*/         #   a "/", preceding whitespace allowed
  (\w+)        #   match group 1: any word character, at least once (e.g. option)
  \s+          #   delimiting white space
  (\w*)        #   match group 2: any word character (e.g. target user)
  \s+          #   delimiting white space
)?             # make the whole thing optional
(              # match group 3:
  (?:          #   start of non-capturing group, either
    .          #     any character (does not include newlines)
    |          #     or
    [\r\n]     #     newline charaters
  )*           #   repeat as often as possible
)              # end match group 3

In your case ("/pm PezCuckow Hi There you so awesome!"):

• group 1: "pm"
• group 2: "PezCuckow"
• group 3: "Hi There you so awesome!"

in a more general case ("Hi There you so awesome!")

• group 1: ""
• group 2: ""
• group 3: "Hi There you so awesome!"

Note that the forward slash needs to be escaped in JavaScript regex literals:

/foo\/bar/

but not in regex patterns in general.

Answer 3

Assuming that only word characters (no spaces, etc) are valid in the name field, this'll do what you want:

var re = /(\/\w+) (\w+) (.+)/;