JavaScript String search() Method

The search() method in JavaScript is used to search for a specified substring within a string. It returns the index of the first occurrence of the substring within the string. If the substring is not found, it returns -1.

Syntax

string.search( A )

Parameters

This method accepts a single parameter A which holds the regular expression as an object.

Return Value

This method returns the index of the first match string in between the regular expression and the given string object and returns -1 if no match is found. Indexing starts from zero (0) and in the first attempt, an alphabet is matched, then it does not check further. Simply, it returns the index of that first matched alphabet.

JavaScript String search() Method Examples

Example 1: Searching Characters with Regular Expressions in JavaScript

The code utilizes the search() method with regular expressions to find the index of matching characters within the string "GeeksforGeeks". It prints the index of the first occurrence of 'G', 'e', and 's' respectively.

// Taking input a string. let string = "GeeksforGeeks"; // Taking a regular expression. let re1 = /G/; let re2 = /e/; let re3 = /s/; // Printing the index of matching alphabets console.log(string.search(re1)); console.log(string.search(re2)); console.log(string.search(re3)); 

0 1 4 

Example 2: Searching Characters without Regular Expressions in JavaScript

let str = "GeeksforGeeks"; let searchString = "for"; let Result = str.search(searchString); console.log(Result); 

5 

Supported Browsers

• Google Chrome 1
• Edge 12
• Firefox 1
• Opera 4
• Safari 1