> if you also want substring matching..merely remove the start and end anchors in the regex.

I'm sorry, you seem to have conflated the string and the regex. That won't work; it's equivalent to saying that /foobar/ will match "ooba" because there aren't any anchors in it. The problem is quite a bit more complicated than that; please take a look at both the specification in my original post and JavaFan's solution, which addresses it perfectly.