CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregexunicode
martintrapp
martintrapp

Reputation: 829

Javascript word boundary unicode space issue

I want to write a regex pattern that matches for full words or phrases even if they have unicode chars to wrap them with some html code. So I use this pattern:

var pattern=new RegExp('(^|\\s)'+phrase+'(?=\\s|$)', "gi");

It works perfectly even on multi-word phrases expect for one issue. If the phrase isn't the start of the string, it matches with the space before the word. So after I wrap it I'll lose that space. I only want to wrap the phrase variable and not the spaces.

For example:

var string="This is a nice sentence.";
var phrase="is a nice";
/*OUTPUT: Thisis a nicesentence*//*HTML OUTPUT: This<span>is a nice</span>sentence*/
/*What I want: This <span>is a nice</span> sentence*/

Of course this pattern could work:

var pattern=new RegExp(phrase, "gi");

But I'm not looking for those strings that are substrings of another.

Is it possible to solve my issue with a better regex pattern?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 294

Answers (1)

Martin Ender
Martin Ender

Reputation: 44279

Simply write back what you captured in group 1:

output = string.replace(pattern, '$1<span>' + phrase + '</span>');

If you are not using replace but match or exec and do the replacement manually, you can still access the capturing group in the returned array and insert the space or empty string before your span.

By the way, if you capture the phrase as well, you don't need any string concatenation in the replacement:

var pattern = new RegExp('(^|\\s)('+phrase+')(?=\\s|$)', "gi");
output = string.replace(pattern, '$1<span>$2</span>');

Upvotes: 1

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