regex prevent match word

Question

i'm using the regex

/part\s?[0-9]*\s?:?/g

to match words like

" part 20 " " part21 " " part30: " etc

the problem is that it matchs also the word "part" inside other words like "Re part ition"

it should match word only if it is a whole word ie

part 01       -match
part 33:      -match
part          -no match
participial   -no match

Answer 1

Seems like what you want is to make one or more digits mandatory, changing * to + , and adding \\b to ensure the "part" is not the end of a larger word:

/\bpart\s?[0-9]+\s?:?/g

And if you are actually using the matched string(s), I would think you would only want to include the whitespace after a number if there was a colon too:

/\bpart\s?[0-9]+(?:\s?:)?/g