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In JavaScript, regular expressions are evaluated as characters within a pair of forward slashes. Inside the forward slashes a pattern is included. The most basic of these is a string literal. The code /joey/ would match any string that has the word 'joey' in it.

The simplest way to evaluate whether a match occurs in a string based on a regular expression is to use the JavaScript test() function. The test() function is given a string and returns true if the pattern contains a match for the regular expression.

For example, to test whether 'joey' appears in the string 'joey javascript':

document.write(/joey/.test('joey javascript'));

If this code is changed to check for 'dave' instead of 'joey', 'false' will be the result.

document.write(/dave/.test('joey'));

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