正则表达式以识别单词之间的分隔符

Question

I am trying to separate words in a text. I need to split them by anything between them so I wrote a regular expression that works almost as it should.

Words are alphabetic strings that can contain dashes (-), they cannot start with dashes or end with dashes. Words cannot contain numerals or any other character besides single dashes and [a-zA-Z].

This is what I came up with so far:

/(-[^a-zA-Z])|\w*\d\w*|[^a-zA-Z-]+/ig

This, however, does not work correctly for words starting with a dash, such as this situation:

123-word

That should match

123-

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Update

Sorry, I was rather vague. I need to match what is between words, not the words themselves, so I can do a split into an array further on.

This is what matches so far with the expression above:

... and this is how it should be like:

Notice the difference of matching at the second text line (123-) Sorry for not being specific enough.

Answer 1

You can use this regex:

/(?<=[^\w-]|^)(?!-)([a-z-]+)(?<!-)(?=[^\w-]|$)/gi

Given an input as follows:

abc-def word A -notword xyz notword-

The above regex will match following words:

abc-def
word
A
xyz

Working demo

---

UPDATE: Based on edited question you can use this regex for splitting:

/([^\w-].*?)(?=(?<=[^\w-]|^)(?!-)[a-z-]+(?<!-)(?=[^\w-]|$))/gis

Working demo

Answer 2

If I understood your question correctly.

Instead of searching for the valid matches, what you want, I replaced all invalid matches.

Have a look at this Demo It is matching all invalid matches according to your question, what I have understood.

"Words are alphabetic strings that can contain dashes (-), they cannot start with dashes or end with dashes. Words cannot contain numerals or any other character besides single dashes and [a-zA-Z]."

This is the Code

var str = 'word word-ed, [word-ing] 123-word w-word, word-. w0rd w14rd 124eword 1234word finished.'
str.replace(/(\b[\d]+-[a-zA-Z]+\b)|(\b[\d]+[a-zA-Z]+)|(\b[a-zA-Z]+[\d]+[a-zA-Z]+)|(\b[a-zA-Z]+-[.,]|([\[\],.]))/g, '').split(/\s+/)

Output

["word", "word-ed", "word-ing", "w-word", "finished"]

Explanation:

Search for Invalid matches

str.match(/(\b[\d]+-[a-zA-Z]+\b)|(\b[\d]+[a-zA-Z]+)|(\b[a-zA-Z]+[\d]+[a-zA-Z]+)|(\b[a-zA-Z]+-[.,]|([\[\],.]))/g)
//output
[",", "[", "]", "123-word", ",", "word-.", "w0rd", "w14rd", "124eword", "1234word", "."]

Replace with null

var temp = str.replace(/(\b[\d]+-[a-zA-Z]+\b)|(\b[\d]+[a-zA-Z]+)|(\b[a-zA-Z]+[\d]+[a-zA-Z]+)|(\b[a-zA-Z]+-[.,]|([\[\],.]))/g)
//output
"word word-ed word-ing  w-word      finished"

split the result with spaces

temp.split(/\s+/)
//output
["word", "word-ed", "word-ing", "w-word", "finished"]