Regex delimiters put back into use?

Question

I am a bit stuck on this, can't figure out how to re-insert the non-word characters ie. "-" and "!". I used regex as a way to split based on those delimiters but do need to retain the indices of the "-" and the "!" and re-introduce once I convert it back into a string from the array. The desired output is "e6t-r3s are r4y fun!" and so far I am getting: 'e6t r3s are r4y fun '

Write a function that takes a string and turns any and all "words" (see below) within that string of length 4 or greater into an abbreviation following the same rules.

abbreviate("elephant-rides are really fun!");

function abbreviate(string) {
    var array = string.split(/\W/); 
    var newArray = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {//iterates through each word
      var word = array[i];
      var abbrString = "";
      if (word.length >= 4) {
          //concat first index,count of indexes in between, last index
          var innerChar = word.substring(1, word.length - 1);
          var indCount = innerChar.length;
          var abbrWord = word.charAt(0) + indCount + word.charAt(word.length-1); 
          newArray.push(abbrWord);
        } else {
          newArray.push(word);
        }

    }
  return newArray.join(" ");
}

Moderator edited: Added markdown so the code renders properly in the forums.

Answer 1 · 2017-10-26T22:47:33Z

October 26, 2017 10:47pm

instead of splitting on non-word with W, you could split on spaces with s. this would retain the exclamation point at the end. the first element would be elephant-rides, which you could split again on the dash, then join back together on a dash, before joining with the other words on a space to get the desired result.

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Regex delimiters put back into use?

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