Custom regex word boundary (javascript)

Question

I'm trying to create a custom word boundary (like \b ) that also takes words starting or ending with the unicode characters "ÆØÅæøå" into consideration.

Now the only thing I can come up with is this ugly thing

((?<?[\wÆØÅæøå])(?=[\wÆØÅæøå])|(?![\wÆØÅæøå])(?<=[\wÆØÅæøå]))

Is there a more elegant solution to this? Or is this the only way.

Answer 1

You can use:

(?<!\p{L}\p{M}*|[\p{N}_]) // leading word boundary, similar to \<, [[:<:]] or \m in other flavors
(?![\p{L}\p{N}_])         // trailing word boundary, similar to \>, [[:>:]] or \M

Compile the regex with the u modifier to enable Unicode category classes.

The (?<!\p{L}\p{M}*|[\p{N}_]) is a negative lookbehind that matches a location not immediately preceded with a letter followed with zero or more diacritic marks or a digit or an underscore.

The (?![\p{L}\p{N}_]) is a negative lookahead that matches a location not immediately followed with a letter, digit or an underscore.