I'm trying to read some specific values from a string.

elementName = "item add item:mk0090 destination:project1";

 You can see there two  key:value  pairs. How can I find this value knowing an key ?

Matching 'item:mk0090' or 'destination:project1' is easy:

elementID.match( '/\b' + 'item' + ':[A-Z0-9]\b/', elementName);

==> item:mk0090

but how to capture for corresponding item value or destination value with regular expression which works also with IE6 (starting at Javascript 1.3) ?

Please help !