I’m having a lot of difficulties matching strings in JavaScript using regex. Problem is when I match strings like “assistant-attorney” with “attorney” it returns true. I cannot ignore/forbid hyphens, as I also want to be able to match “assistant-attorney” with “assistant-attorney” and also get true. Can’t figure out if I should use word boundaries, or check if string does not start with white space or hyphen.
What I have so far is this:
([^-])(attorney)
Here’s a test: https://www.regextester.com/?fam=121381
Hope anyone can help, thanks in advance.
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Answer
I think a simple Negative Lookbehind group could do the trick
(?<!-)attorney
Negative Lookbehind
(?<!-)Assert that the Regex below does not match
UPDATE
As @MonkeyZeus said, the first version failed on attorneys and fakewordwithattorneyinit
The new regexp is using negative lookbehind and negative lookahead look like this :
b(?<!-)attorney(?!-)b if you want to match in all string
^b(?<!-)attorney(?!-)b if you want to match “line begins with term”