I want to check for duplicated words right next to each other, but even if there is punctuation in between.
For example:
Vivamus Vivamus diam, diam, Vivamus Vivamus diam, diam Vivamus
There should be four distinct hits here.
I can't figure out why this isn't working. Why? What should the correct code be?
(\w*(?:[ ,\.])*?)\1
PS: This is not necessarily for the Perl engine.
The (?: is a non-capturing parenthesis, meaning it won't store the matches. You will need to use capturing parentheses.
(\w+)\W+\1
[[\w|\W]+ ]+ worked for me. Breakdown:
\w: word character
\W: non-word character
[\w|\W]+: each character may be a word or non-word character and repeated one or more times
[[\w|\W]+ ]+: ...appended with a space at some point, all occurring one or more times
The original expression doesn't create a separate capture for the punctuation, but does include the captured punctuation in the first capture. That means it would spot things like:
diam, diam, really, really, twice.
But you aren't really interested in the punctuation, so TJ L's solution works properly, even though the '(?: ) is a non-capturing parenthesis' explanation is somewhat ... incomplete? The comment quoted is accurate, but it isn't why the overall regex failed.
