CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptmysqlregexsearch
Riz
Riz

Reputation: 10246

Search a word using regular expression

How to search a word in exact match, for example how to search word 'leak', but search results should not include words like 'leaked' or 'leaks' etc.

Help in both Javascript and MySQL would be appreciated.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 708

Answers (4)

alexsuslin
alexsuslin

Reputation: 4224

\bleak\b

I've tested it on the following inputs:

  1. leaked or leak. 'leaks' etc.
  2. leak, hello
  3. find:leak-hello
  4. hello world!leak

Upvotes: 0

m0skit0
m0skit0

Reputation: 25874

The regex would be

/\bleak\b/

Usage in JavaScript

var patt1=/\bleak\b/i;
patt1.test(your_string); // Returns true/false

For MySQL (I didn't know it had support for regexes, thanks Rohan Prabhu):

expr REGEXP [[:<:]]leak[[:>:]]

Upvotes: 1

Rohan Prabhu
Rohan Prabhu

Reputation: 7302

Basically, you need to look for word boundaries. So don't think of looking for the word leak, but looking for the word $leak#, where $ is an imaginary character that is at the beginning of every word and # is an imaginary character at the end of every word (Not a standard convention, just assume it for this example). The words are delimited, by, lets say whitespaces for now. So, leaked and leaks is $leaked# and $leaks#. As such, the only part that matches is $leak and not $leak#.

To do that in MySQL, the condition would be:

REGEXP '[[:<:]]leak[[:>:]]';

Here, [[:<:]] is the begin-word word-boundary and [[:>:]] is the end-word word-boundary.

For JavaScript, the query would be:

/\bleak\b/

Here, the sequence \b represents a word-boundary (in javascript, there is no distinction between begin-word and end-word boundaries). It won't only work for whitespaces, but even punctuation characters, for example:

.leak
,leak
;leak

will match /\bleak\b/, but aleak will not. (I am unsure about MySQL though)

Upvotes: 4

Aram Kocharyan
Aram Kocharyan

Reputation: 20431

This will match words that don't start with leak*

(?!leak\w*)\b\w+\b

Matches in bold:

  • notleaked leaks leak leaked

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions