Regular expression for exact word fails when it's consecutive in a sentence

Question

So I'm trying to match all the instances of the word "test" exactly in a given text, and I'm using the following regex:

/(^|\s)test(\s|\.|$|,|!|\?|;|¿|¡)/gi

It works when the text is something like "this is a test. How is the test going? test." However, when you have two or more consecutive "test"'s it does not work.

ie:

var regex = /(^|\s)test(\s|\.|$|,|!|\?|;|¿|¡)/gi;
"test test test".match(regex); 
//returns only ["test", "test"], should be ["test", "test", "test"]

What can I do to make the regex work with consecutive words?

What is the purpose of this? Do you want to know the count of `test` word? — Martin Adámek, Oct 26 '17 at 20:27
It doesn’t return `["test", "test"]`. It returns `["test ", " test"]` (note the spaces). So, what is your actual expected return value? — Sebastian Simon, Oct 26 '17 at 20:29
Well you're *not* matching the word `test`, you're matching the word `test` and the character before and the character after it. — Bergi, Oct 26 '17 at 20:29
A dupe of [whole word match in javascript](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2232934/whole-word-match-in-javascript) and [Regex match entire words only](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1751301/regex-match-entire-words-only). — Wiktor Stribiżew, Oct 26 '17 at 20:35

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 26 '17 at 20:30

1

The second test is missing because the space character is consumed when matching the first test pattern; You can change the second parenthesis to look ahead so it doesn't consume characters:

var regex = /(?:^|\s)test(?=\s|\.|$|,|!|\?|;|¿|¡)/gi;
console.log("test test test".match(regex));

answered Oct 26 '17 at 20:30

Psidom

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this did the trick, thanks – janedoe Oct 26 '17 at 23:48

Paul-Etienne · Answer 2 · 2017-10-27T07:25:39.203

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I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but this regex :

(?<=\W)test(?=\W)

will match any test word preceded and followed by a non word character. This way, it wont match "testtest" for example.

See Regex101.com

Edit : I am surprised to discover that lookbehind assertions aren't supported in JavaScript apparently (see here for example). I think in your case the best regex would be the one suggested in the comments : \btest\b.

edited Oct 27 '17 at 07:25

answered Oct 26 '17 at 20:31

Paul-Etienne

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I just tried this and it's saying invalid regular expression unfortunately. – janedoe Oct 27 '17 at 01:22
I've just edited my answer, apparently lookbehind assertions aren't supported in JS. But you've got one working with the chosen answer anyway, so all good. – Paul-Etienne Oct 27 '17 at 07:26

Regular expression for exact word fails when it's consecutive in a sentence

2 Answers2