RegEx to extract all matches from string using RegExp.exec

I'm trying to parse the following kind of string:

[key:"val" key2:"val2"]

where there are arbitrary key:"val" pairs inside. I want to grab the key name and the value. For those curious I'm trying to parse the database format of task warrior.

Here is my test string:

[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]

which is meant to highlight that anything can be in a key or value aside from space, no spaces around the colons, and values are always in double quotes.

In node, this is my output:

[deuteronomy][gatlin][~]$ node
> var re = /^\[(?:(.+?):"(.+?)"\s*)+\]$/g
> re.exec('[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]');
[ '[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]',
  'uuid',
  '123sth',
  index: 0,
  input: '[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]' ]

But description:"aoeu" also matches this pattern. How can I get all matches back?

Continue calling re.exec(s) in a loop to obtain all the matches:

var re = /\s*([^[:]+):\"([^"]+)"/g;
var s = '[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]';
var m;

do {
    m = re.exec(s);
    if (m) {
        console.log(m[1], m[2]);
    }
} while (m);

Try it with this JSFiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/7yS2V/

str.match(pattern), if pattern has the global flag g, will return all the matches as an array.

For example:

const str = 'All of us except @Emran, @Raju and @Noman were there';
console.log(
  str.match(/@\w*/g)
);
// Will log ["@Emran", "@Raju", "@Noman"]

To loop through all matches, you can use the replace function:

var re = /\s*([^[:]+):\"([^"]+)"/g;
var s = '[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]';

s.replace(re, function(match, g1, g2) { console.log(g1, g2); });

This is a solution

var s = '[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]';

var re = /\s*([^[:]+):\"([^"]+)"/g;
var m;
while (m = re.exec(s)) {
  console.log(m[1], m[2]);
}

This is based on lawnsea's answer, but shorter.

Notice that the `g' flag must be set to move the internal pointer forward across invocations.

str.match(/regex/g)

returns all matches as an array.

If, for some mysterious reason, you need the additional information comes with exec, as an alternative to previous answers, you could do it with a recursive function instead of a loop as follows (which also looks cooler :).

function findMatches(regex, str, matches = []) {
   const res = regex.exec(str)
   res && matches.push(res) && findMatches(regex, str, matches)
   return matches
}

// Usage
const matches = findMatches(/regex/g, str)

as stated in the comments before, it's important to have g at the end of regex definition to move the pointer forward in each execution.

RegEx to extract all matches from string using RegExp.exec

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