为什么这个使用单词分隔符（\\ b）的正则表达式不匹配.Net中的示例？

Question

Should be simple enough, but this thing not working is baffling me, any insight into why is greatly appreciated.
I'm trying to match any instances of an abbreviated word with any number of trailing '.','/' or '-'. Notice I'm using a '\\b' to try to grab the whole 'word' including the trailing characters mentioned above but not any following characters (it also has the advantage of matching against the end of the line or string). I'm using the following expression:

(?<target>\bLLC[\./\-]+\b)  

As an example, i'm trying to make it match this:

Ace Charter High School LLC. East Liberty  

I want the expression to select 'LLC.' but instead it's not picking any matches I don't know why.
I've tried debugging the expression using RegexBuddy and it works if I remove the trailing '\\b' but that's not what I want as I explained before

Anyone has any idea why this isn't working?

Answer 1

There is no word boundary that matches the last \\b .

The closest word boundaries are after LLC and before East , and your pattern doesn't allow for the last \\b to be at either of those places.

Answer 2

Try

(?<target>\bLLC[\./\-]+)\s*\b

This allows the whitespace preceding the word boundary (which is between the space and E as Guffa points out) without including those spaces in the match group " target ".

On the other hand, matching a word boundary after the . isn't gaining you much, since punctuation is going to cause a word boundary unless it's followed by other punctuation.

Answer 3

I've had good responses that pointed me in the right direction but none really proposed an alternative to using '\\b' that had the same effect in terms of what is being targeted and that will match separator characters as well as the end of the string.
As Guffa pointed out, the issue is that I was using '\\b' as a way to select any separator character or the end of the string at the position before that separator, when in reality it actually performs as what it represents: a word separator. Since my selector was already in a position outside a word, it doesn't match as this position (after the '.') is neither the beginning of a word or the end of one, hence there are no matches in the whole string as a '\\b' after the target is still required for the match.
I've finally settled for using the following expression:

(?<target>\bLLC[\./\-]+)([^a-zA-Z0-9]|$)

This matches any non alphanumeric character as well as the end of string and will match the 'target' group without any of the separating characters before or after producing the same effect I wanted in the first place. Thanks again for the responses and hopefully this will help others in a similar problem