正则表达式匹配一些符号，但不包含一些符号

Question

There is paragraph, and I want to use regular expression to extract all the words inside.

a bdag agasg it's the cookies for dogs',don't you think so? the word 'wow' in english means.you hey b 097  dag final

I have tried several regexes with re.findall(regX,str), and found one that can match most words.

regX = "[ ,\.\?]?([a-z]+'?[a-z]?)[ ,\.\?]?"

['a', 'bdag', 'agasg', "it's", 'the', 'cookies', 'for', "dogs'", "don't", 'you', 'think', 'so', 'the', 'word', " wow' ", 'in', 'english', 'means', 'you', 'hey', 'b', 'dag', 'final']

All are good except **wow'** .

I wonder if regular expression could explain the logic "it can be a comma/space/period/etc but can't be an apostrophe".

Can someone advise?

Answer 1

Try:

[ ,\.\?']?([a-z]*('\w)?)[\' ,\.\?]? 

Added another group so you'll have to select only group 1.

Answer 2

I didn't fully understand what you wanted the output to be but, try this:

[ ,\.\?]?(["-']?+[a-z]+["-']?[a-z]?)[ ,\.\?]? 

using this regex lets you get the ' and " within the text.

if this still was not what you wanted please let me know so I can update my answer.