CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
pstinnett
pstinnett

Reputation: 275

Regex to select term if it does not contain hyphens

I'm trying to find the proper regular expression to select a term if it does NOT include hyphens. For example, I want to find the term debt but not debt-to-income.

I've got \bdebt-to-income\b which will select just debt-to-income, but I need the opposite. Help!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3427

Answers (5)

erikxiv
erikxiv

Reputation: 4075

If the purpose is to find specific words in a stream of characters, where words are defined as a consecutive number of characters including hyphens, then I think \b needs to be abandoned as it in Javascript considers hyphens as word boundaries. Examples would be in-debt or debt-to-income which would be matched incorrectly according to the above assumption. By defining a word character instead as [\w\-] the following regex would match the correct words, but unfortunately require replacing a capture group as the first part matches the preceding character due to the lack of lookbehind support in Javascript.

(?:^|[^\w\-])(debt)(?=[^\w\-])

Upvotes: 0

georg
georg

Reputation: 214949

Basically, you're looking for "term followed by not-a-letter but not hyphen":

term = "debt"
re = new RegExp("\\b" + term + "(?=[^\\w-])", "g")
text = "this is debt and debt, debtword and debt-to-income"
console.log(text.replace(re, "<$&>"))

result:

this is <debt> and <debt>, debtword and debt-to-income

Upvotes: 1

Amarghosh
Amarghosh

Reputation: 59451

debt\b([^\-]|$)

debt followed by a character other than a hyphen or end of string.

If you want to check left side as well: (^|[^\-])\bdebt\b([^\-]|$)

Upvotes: 1

Blender
Blender

Reputation: 298046

Just use JavaScript:

var hyphens = 'debt-to-income';

if (hyphens.indexOf('-') == -1) {
  // No hyphens
}

Upvotes: 2

Rob W
Rob W

Reputation: 348962

Use the following pattern: "debt" not followed by "-to-income"

\bdebt(?!-to-income)

This pattern can easily be expanded to restrict more, for example "debt-of-the-usa":

\bdebt(?!-to-income|-of-the-usa)

You should not just look for a hyphen, because debt-free (when debt-free means nothing) should also be matched, probably.

Upvotes: 1

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