0
281
ViewsHow to regex match words with/without hyphen
I'm having a lot of difficulties matching strings in JavaScript using regex. Problem is when I match strings like "assistant-attorney" with "attorney" it returns true. I cannot ignore/forbid hyphens, as I also want to be able to match "assistant-attorney" with "assistant-attorney" and also get true. Can't figure out if I should use word boundaries, or check if string does not start with white space or hyphen.
What I have so far is this:
([^-])(attorney)
Here's a test: https://www.regextester.com/?fam=121381
Hope anyone can help, thanks in advance.
2 answers
Answer question0
I think you need to use word boundaries and enhance them with additional requirements:
(?<=^|[^-])\battorney\b(?=[^-]|$)
(?<=^|[^-])- assert that behind me is the start of a line or is not a hyphen\b- word boundaryattorney- the search term\b- word boundary(?=[^-]|$)- assert that in front of me is not a hyphen or is the end of a line
attorney - https://regex101.com/r/HCRKWi/1
assistant-attorney - https://regex101.com/r/2tvU1n/1
0
I think a simple Negative Lookbehind group could do the trick
(?<!-)attorney
Negative Lookbehind
(?<!-)Assert that the Regex below does not match
UPDATE
As @MonkeyZeus said, the first version failed on attorneys and fakewordwithattorneyinit
The new regexp is using negative lookbehind and negative lookahead look like this :
\b(?<!-)attorney(?!-)\b if you want to match in all string
^\b(?<!-)attorney(?!-)\b if you want to match "line begins with term"