regular expression - have to insert extra"\" 1

[patlv23]

Hi!

I'm new to regexp and javascript so bear with me.

I have the following regular expression in Javascript:
commPattern = new RegExp("^\d\.\d{1,3}$&quot ;
to check for a format such as 0.01, 9.231, etc. however it doesn't work and returns null.
I tried doing an alert( commPattern ) and it displayed /^d.d{1,3}$/

I tried adding an extra "\" since I was out of ideas:
commPattern = new RegExp("^\\d\\.\\d{1,3}$&quot ;
and it worked! doing an alert( commPattern ) displays the regexp correctly: /^\d\.\d{1,3}$/.

This confuses me a lot since I've read in all the tutorials that "/" enables us to use stuff like "\d" for numeric characters or "/." to match ".". I'm thinking from what I've read, that I don't need to add the extra "\". I even tried my search string in

http://koralsoft.dir.bg/venimus/index.htm

and it was working fine.

Any help would be appreciated

Environment:
Windows 2000
IE 5.50.4807.2300 SP2- downloaded from

http://browsers.evolt.org/

I think, since MS stopped providing a 5.5 download.

 

[theboyhope]

commPattern = /^\d\.\d{1,3}$/;
alert( commPattern.test( '0.001' ) );

This work for ya?

 

[patlv23]

yup, thanks theboyhope, forgot to follow up that i tested that syntax and it worked. I already figured out that "\" is also an escape character for strings in javascript, which is why the extra "\" is needed.