regex filter out words wrapped in certain characters

Question

I am trying to use regex in c# to handle a scenario where I want to find all instances of a word that are not wrapped in certain characters. A quick example is below when trying to highlight the word "high"

highlight
[+highlight
highlight+]
[+highlight some more+]
[+highlight+]

I was trying to use negative look ahead and behind but this doesn't appear to play all that nice. Something like this

(?<!\[[\+|-])\w*high\w*(?![\+|-]\])

The outcome I am after is the word "high" would be found in all but the last scenario.

Answer 1

Try this pattern:

(?<=^|\s)(?<!\[[+|-])\w*high\w*|\w*high\w*(?![+|-]\])(?=$|\s)

Regex101