Regex expression

General
1

Hi all,
I need a RegEx search expression to lookup words from a list. The words should not start or end with any punctuation characters
e.g. ALL is ok, *ALL is not ok, TEST- is not ok, TEST is ok, …

What I have so far is “\b(ALL|TEST)\b” or (\W|^)(ALL|TEST)(\W|$), that’s working with the words, but punctuation is not
excluded.

Any Help?

Thank’s Peter

2

Peter can you post your method/function that you also have so far?

Thanks!

3

It’s hard to say without seeming the actual list. Are you looking for particular words, or any words that meet your criteria?

I’m assuming the latter, so this should work. If I could see the actual text that you’re matching against, it would be better.

\\b(?<![[:punct:]])\\w+\\b(?![[:punct:]])

This looks for a word boundary (\b), then uses a negative lookbehind to make sure the previous character is not a punctuation mark. It then looks for a stream of word characters (\w+) and another word boundary. Finally, it uses a negative lookahead to make sure the next character is not a punctuation mark.

4

[quote=87847:@Kem Tekinay]It’s hard to say without seeing the actual list. Are you looking for particular words, or any words that meet your criteria?

I’m assuming the latter, so this should work. If I could see the actual text that you’re matching against, it would be better.

\\b(?<![[:punct:]])\\w+\\b(?![[:punct:]])

This looks for a word boundary (\b), then uses a negative lookbehind to make sure the previous character is not a punctuation mark. It then looks for a stream of word characters (\w+) and another word boundary. Finally, it uses a negative lookahead to make sure the next character is not a punctuation mark.[/quote]

5

That was an unfortunate inability to edit my post. And now I can’t delete the bogus duplicate either.

6

Kem, thank you, that’s working!

“\b(?<![[:punct:]])(ALL|FOR|TEST|…)\b(?![[:punct:]])”