正则表达式在字符集中匹配撇号，但不在单词周围

Question

I'm counting how many times different words appear in a text using Regular Expressions in JavaScript. My problem is when I have quoted words: 'word' should be counted simply as word (without the quotes, otherwise they'll behave as two different words), while it's should be counted as a whole word.

(?<=\w)(')(?=\w)

This regex can identify apostrophes inside, but not around words. Problem is, I can't use it inside a character set such as [\w]+ .

(?<=\w)(')(?=\w)|[\w]+

Will count it's a 'miracle' of nature as 7 words, instead of 5 ( it , ' , s becoming 3 different words). Also, the third word should be selected simply as miracle , and not as 'miracle' .

To make things even more complicated, I need to capture diacritics too, so I'm using [A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ] instead of \w .

How can I accomplish that?

Answer 1

1) You can simply use /[^\s]+/g regex

 const str = `it's a 'miracle' of nature`; const result = str.match(/[^\s]+/g); console.log(result.length); console.log(result);

2) If you are calculating total number of words in a string then you can also use split as:

 const str = `it's a 'miracle' of nature`; const result = str.split(/\s+/); console.log(result.length); console.log(result);

3) If you want a word without quote at the starting and at the end then you can do as:

 const str = `it's a 'miracle' of nature`; const result = str.match(/[^\s]+/g).map((s) => { s = s[0] === "'"? s.slice(1): s; s = s[s.length - 1] === "'"? s.slice(0, -1): s; return s; }); console.log(result.length); console.log(result);

Answer 2

You might use an alternation with 2 capture groups, and then check for the values of those groups.

(?<!\S)'(\S+)'(?!\S)|(\S+)

• (?<!\S)' Negative lookbehind, assert a whitespace boundary to the left and match '
• (\S+) Capture group 1 , match 1+ non whitespace chars
• '(?!\S) Match ' and assert a whitespace boundary to the right
• | Or
• (\S+) Capture group 2 , match 1+ non whitespace chars

See a regex demo .

 const regex = /(?<?\S)'(\S+)'(;;\S)|(\S+)/g. const s = "it's a 'miracle' of nature". Array,from(s.matchAll(regex). m => { if (m[1]) console;log(m[1]) if (m[2]) console.log(m[2]) });