jQuery regular expression

[brianlange]

The regular expression in jQuery to test for for HTML strings and ID strings is

/^[^<]*(<[\w\W]+>)[^>]*$|^#([\w-]+)$/

 

What I don't understand is why the return value for  regExp.exec('#test') returns #test,,test

I don't understand why it returns an empty string for the second result?  When I only use the second half of the expression /^#([\w-]+)$/  the return value is '#test','test' and when I only use the first half of the expression

/^[^<]*(<[\w\W]+>)[^>]*$/ the return value is null.  Can someone explain this?

 

Thanks,

 

Brian