Regex (en-US) to find all punctuation EXCEPT if part of word

Question

I've found the regex to locate all hyphenated and "apostrophied" words:

(?=\S*['-])([a-zA-Z'-]+)

Examples: l'Equipe and action-oriented

I'm not sure how to utilize this information to get what I want after a bit of searching...

Answer 1

Try this regex

(?<=\b)[,.'-:"]+(?=\s|$)|"

Demo: https://regex101.com/r/mDhl17/1/

Here are some details

• This regex will start with Positive Lookbehind with a word boundary token in order to exclude any punctuation that has letters before it.
• We add the targeted punctuation mark afterward [,.'-:"]+ . You can add to the list whatever you prefer to catch.
• We expect the punctuation marks to be followed by either a space or to be at the end of the sentence (?=\\s|$) .
• An exception to this, is the quotation marks " " , we want to catch them whenever they are there, so I added the OR | condition at the end.