regex capture with g modifier captures only first occurrence - regex

Question

Using EcmaScript 6 RegExp
From this : "-=Section A=- text A -=Section B=- text b"
I want to get this: ['Section A', 'text A', 'Section B', 'text B']
Apart from the delimiters, everything else is variable. (Eventually '-=someString=-' will be '' but for now I did not want to clutter things up or create errors with characters that need escaping.)
I am not a regex expert, but I have searched all day for an example or guidance to make this work without success.
For example using this code:
let templateString = "-=Section A=- text A -=Section B=- text b";
let regex = RegExp('-=(.*?)=-(.*?)','g');
I only get this: ["-=Section A=-", "Section A", ""]
I am not sure how to make the second of the captures capture 'text A'. Also I do not understand why the g modifier is not making it continue after the first match and go on to find 'Section B' and 'text B'.
Any pointers to some examples would be appreciated - I have failed to find any.

Answer 1

Note that (.*?) at the end of the pattern will always match an empty string since it is lazy, and is not executed in the first place. text A cannot be matched because the matches ends with =-, since .*? does not have to be matched.
You may use
let templateString = "-=Section A=- text A -=Section B=- text b";
let regex = /\s*-=(.*?)=-\s*/;
console.log(templateString.split(regex).filter(Boolean));
The \s*-=(.*?)=-\s* pattern finds
\s* - 0+ whitespaces
-= - a -= substring
(.*?) - Group 1: any 0+ chars, as few as possible up to the first occurrence of the subsequent subpatterns
=- - a =- substring
\s* - 0+ whitespaces.
The String#split method adds to the resulting array all substrings captured into Group 1.
If you want to use a matching approach, you would need to match any char, 0 or more occurrences, that does not start the leading char sequence, which seems to be -= in your scenario:
let templateString = "-=Section A=- text A -=Section B=- text b";
let regex = /-=(.*?)=-\s*([^-]*(?:-(?!=)[^-]*)*)/g;
let m, res=[];
while (m=regex.exec(templateString)) {
res.push([m[1], m[2].trim()]);
}
console.log(res);
See this regex demo
Details
-=(.*?)=-\s* - same as in the first regex (see the split regex above)
([^-]*(?:-(?!=)[^-]*)*) - Group 2 that matches and captures:
[^-]* - 0+ chars other than -
(?: - start of a non-capturing group that matches
-(?!=) - a hyphen that is not immediately followed with =
[^-]* - 0+ chars other than -
)* - ...zero or more times