I have a regex that matches these strings in a string; however, it is matching non-words ( parts-of-words ) as well.
For example city is matched as it contains it. However, I want only the string it to be matched it if it the only characters between whitespace. So it or he would match, but not city or where.
Here is the regex ( pretty basic and simple ): they|he|she|her|him|them|it.
How can I get it to match these words if the word is only this?
Use word boundaries to denote the beginning and ending of a word.
http://www.regular-expressions.info/wordboundaries.html
So your regex would become something on the order of:
\b(they|he|she|her|him|them|it)\b
It should be noted that this regular expression won't match words containing apostrophes, e.g. can't, won't, etc. For a discussion of this, see the following Stackoverflow post:
Try to put an word boundary before the words,
(?:\bthey\b|\bhe\b|\bshe\b|\bher\b|\bhim\b|\bthem\b|\bit\b)
Explanation:
(?:...) # Non captuaring groups
\b # Word boundary(It matches between a word character and a non word character)
