Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition

5.1. Find a Specific Word

Problem

You’re given the simple task of finding all occurrences of the word cat, case insensitively. The catch is that it must appear as a complete word. You don’t want to find pieces of longer words, such as hellcat, application, or Catwoman.

Solution

Word boundary tokens make this a very easy problem to solve:

\bcat\b

Regex options: Case insensitive

Regex flavors: .NET, Java, JavaScript, PCRE, Perl, Python, Ruby

Discussion

The word boundaries at both ends of the regular expression ensure that cat is matched only when it appears as a complete word. More precisely, the word boundaries require that cat is set apart from other text by the beginning or end of the string, whitespace, punctuation, or other nonword characters.

Regular expression engines consider letters, numbers, and underscores to all be word characters. Recipe 2.6 is where we first talked about word boundaries, and covers them in greater detail.

A problem can occur when working with international text in JavaScript, PCRE, and Ruby, since those regular expression flavors only consider letters in the ASCII table to create a word boundary. In other words, word boundaries are found only at the positions between a match of ‹[^A-Za-z0-9_]|^› and ‹[A-Za-z0-9_]›, or between ‹[A-Za-z0-9_]› and ‹[^A-Za-z0-9_]|$›. The same is true in Python when the UNICODE or U flag is not set. This prevents ‹\b› from being useful for a “whole word only” search within text that contains accented letters or words that use non-Latin ...