How do I retrieve all matches for a regular expression in JavaScript?

Continue calling re.exec(s) in a loop to obtain all the matches:

var re = /\s*([^[:]+):\"([^"]+)"/g;
var s = '[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]';
var m;

do {
    m = re.exec(s);
    if (m) {
        console.log(m[1], m[2]);
    }
} while (m);

Try it with this jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/7yS2V/

This is a solution

var s = '[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]';

var re = /\s*([^[:]+):\"([^"]+)"/g;
var m;
while (m = re.exec(s)) {
  console.log(m[1], m[2]);
}

This is based on lawnsea's answer, but shorter.

Notice that the `g' flag must be set to move the internal pointer forward across invocations.

Based on Agus's function, but I prefer return just the match values:

var bob = "> bob <";
function matchAll(str, regex) {
    var res = [];
    var m;
    if (regex.global) {
        while (m = regex.exec(str)) {
            res.push(m[1]);
        }
    } else {
        if (m = regex.exec(str)) {
            res.push(m[1]);
        }
    }
    return res;
}
var Amatch = matchAll(bob, /(&.*?;)/g);
console.log(Amatch);  // yeilds: [>, <]

Here is my function to get the matches :

function getAllMatches(regex, text) {
    if (regex.constructor !== RegExp) {
        throw new Error('not RegExp');
    }

    var res = [];
    var match = null;

    if (regex.global) {
        while (match = regex.exec(text)) {
            res.push(match);
        }
    }
    else {
        if (match = regex.exec(text)) {
            res.push(match);
        }
    }

    return res;
}

var regex = /abc|def|ghi/g;
var res = getAllMatches(regex, 'abcdefghi');

res.forEach(function (item) {
    console.log(item[0]);
});

To loop within a string, you can fake a replace:

var re = /\s*([^[:]+):\"([^"]+)"/g;
var s = '[description:"aoeu" uuid:"123sth"]';
s.replace(re,function($0,$1,$2){console.log($1+","+$2+"<br/>");});