How to prevent matching single quotes that have white space on their right?

Question

The following regex is made to match single quotes that should be replaced by smart right single quote ( ’ ):

It works. But as you can see, it shouldn't match the one in '*text*. So I modified the regex:

(\S)'(?!\b)|(?=\b)'(?=\b)

The problem now is that it's not only matching the quotes but the other punctuation too:

I'm not a regex expert so I'm not sure how to do it so that only the single quotes are matched in the new regex.

Answer 1

You can use backreference of your captured group #1 in replacement to get back what you've matched using (\S):

var re = /(\S)'(?!\b)|(?=\b)'(?=\b)/g; 
var str = 'text, \'*text* text?\'\n*It\'s text couldn\'t I\'d text.\'*';

var result = str.replace(re, '$1’');

PS: Your regex can be shortened to:

/(\S)'\B|\b'\b/g

RegEx Demo

Answer 2

I may be misinterpreting your question, but I think you're trying to match a single quote if it's not preceded by a whitespace. The following regex uses a lookbehind to assert it's in a position preceded by \S (a non-whitespace character).

/(?<=\S)'/g

regex101 demo