Regex for matching word but not if it starts or ends with hyphen or colon

Question

I've been having trouble figuring out the correct regex (in Ruby) for matching a word in a string, but not if the word starts or ends with a - or : .

I currently have:

/\bmatch this\b/i

The regex should match ( match this ) in:

 please match this!
 do not match this.

but not match:

do not :match this
do not -match this
do not match this:
do not match this-

I've tried:

/\b[^:-]match this[^:-]\b/i

I'd appreciate any help! I'm using the regex in Ruby, if it makes a difference.

Answer 1

我想我想通了，使用否定的后视和否定的前瞻

/(?<![:-])\bmatch this\b(?![:-])/i