Javascript Regex Lookbehind Alternative

Question

I want to catch word with non-space.

var paragraphy="Apple banana kişiler ki örnek foo.";
var word="kişiler"; 
var regex = new RegExp("(?:[\\s>]|^)("+word+")(?=[.,;?!]?(?:[<\\s])|$)", "gi");
console.log(paragraphy.match);

This prints: [" kişiler"] but I want this result: ["kişiler"] I must use Positive Lookbehind but it is not supported in JavaScript. Is there an alternative solution?

Answer 1

Since you can't use word boundaries with unicode characters, let's match the spaces but group the word to retrieve it :

(?:^|\s)(<your word>)(?:\s|$)

After a match, group 1 should be the expected word.

For instance :

var regex = /(?:^|\s)(kişiler)(?:\s|$)/
var paragraphy="Apple banana kişiler ki örnek foo."
paragraphy.match(regex)[1]
> "kişiler"

Answer 2

JS Demo

 var paragraphy="Apple ba kişiler nana ki örnek foo."; var word="kişiler"; var regex = new RegExp("(?:^|\\\\s)("+word+")(?=\\\\s|$)", "gi"); var m = regex.exec(paragraphy); document.writeln(m[1]);