Text Processing with JavaScript

Recipe 53

Matching Unicode Word Boundaries with the Unicode Property Escape

Task

Suppose you want to search a document for the Portuguese word “vã,” which means “go,” without matching other words that contain “vã,” such as “vão.” To achieve this, you try using word boundaries to isolate the word “vã” from other words containing similar characters:

part_2/unicode_property_escapes_p3/upe_p3_ex1.js

const re = /\bvã\b/;

"vão".match(re);
// → ["vã", index: 0, input: "vão bem", groups: undefined]

"vã bem".match(re);
// → null

But, your regex is matching the opposite of your intended result. The problem is that the word boundary (\b) considers accented characters such as “ã” as non-word characters. You need an alternative ...