Regex replace all occurences of a word unless its the last word

Question

I am trying to replace all occurrences of a word unless the word is at the end of the sentence, for example:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

If I am removing the word dog, the above sentence should remain the same,

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

but if the sentence was:

The dog was lazy

dog would be removed from the sentence and would have the following result;

The was lazy

I am not well versed with regex I tried something like this;

(dog)(?=(dog))

Apparently this is wrong, because it does not remove any.

You probably mean `/\bdog\b(?!$)/g` – Wiktor Stribiżew Jul 21 '22 at 20:15 — Wiktor Stribiżew, Jul 21 '22 at 20:15

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 21 '22 at 20:22

You can use

/\bdog\b(?!$)/g

If you need to account end of any line:

/\bdog\b(?!$)/gm

Details:

\b - a word boundary
dog - a word dog
\b - a word boundary
(?!$) - a negative lookahead that fails the match if there is end of string immediately to the right of the current location.

Note: to also remove initial whitespace, add \s*: \s*\bdog\b(?!$).

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 22 '22 at 09:59

To remove a word and one or more non-word characters if there is another word ahead:

\bdog\W+\b

See this demo at regex101 (I used [^\w\n] instead \W for not skipping lines in multiline-demo)

2 Answers2