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up vote 3 down vote favorite

This question already has an answer here:

I have a string delimited like so (it's not an array it's a straight string)

string = " [United States] [Canada] [India] ";

I want to do something like below.

if( string contains "Canada" ) {
 //Do Canada stuff here
}

Thanks for any tips

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marked as duplicate by halfer, Trott, Stony, Blachshma, Shikiryu Apr 2 '13 at 8:26

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.
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2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted 
var string = '[United States][Canada][India]';
var search = 'Canada';
if (string.indexOf('[' + search + ']') !== -1) {
  // Whatever
}
share|improve this answer
    
This is the right way to do it, except that you should be checking that indexOf isn't returning -1, otherwise your check would fail for the first item in the list as it would return 0. –  Matt Apr 4 '12 at 16:54
    
@Matt Thanks your absolutely correct. I actually meant to put >-1 and got distracted and didn't even realize my mistake. –  qw3n Apr 5 '12 at 2:56
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up vote 3 down vote

Just extend the String methods... as a bonus i added a case-insensitive match

// Only line you really need 
String.prototype.has = function(text) { return this.toLowerCase().indexOf("[" + text.toLowerCase() + "]") != -1; };

// As per your example
var Countries = " [United States] [Canada] [India] ";

// Check Spain
 if (Countries.has("Spain")) {
   alert("We got Paella!");
} 
// Check Canada
if (Countries.has("Canada")) {
   alert("We got canadian girls!");
}
// Check Malformed Canada
 if (Countries.has("cAnAdA")) {
   alert("We got insensitive cAnAdiAn girls!");
}
// This Check should be false, as it only matches part of a country
if (Countries.has("Ana")) {
   alert("We got Ana, bad, bad!");
}

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/xNGQU/2/

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1  
NICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! –  El Guapo Apr 4 '12 at 16:12
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