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.
>Solution :
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