Regular Expressions 101

Community Patterns

Word Pattern

1

Regular Expression
ECMAScript (JavaScript)

/
(?:[^\p{Script=Latin}\s\w;:.,\-[\](){}'"+\/=<>])\B|(?:(?:[\p{Script=Latin}]|[^\s\w;:.,\-[\](){}'"+\/=<>]){2,}(?:(?:[\p{Script=Latin}]|[^\s\w+.,–:;\/\\=<>])?(?:[\p{Script=Latin}]|[^\s\w;\-:.,\[\](){}'"+\/\\=<>]))*)|(?:(?:[0-9\p{Script=Latin}]|[^\s\w;:.,[\](){}\-'"+\/\\=<>])(?:(?:[0-9\p{Script=Latin}]|[^\s\w+\-:;\/\\=<>])?(?:[0-9\p{Script=Latin}]|[^\s\w;:.,\-[\](){}'"+\/\\=<>]))*)
/
gmui

Description

Word Patterns - multilanguage

Separating words that handle many use cases I needed, more than simple /\bword\b/gi.

Below are some targeted test cases and acceptable failed cases:

  • Bão Yagi (được Việt Nam định danh là bão số 3, được phía Philippines đặt tên bão Enteng - tiếng Anh: Severe Tropical Storm Enteng , nguyên văn 'Bão nhiệt đới dữ dội Enteng')
  • Some legal "[d]ocuments" contain corrected spel[l]ing, gram(m)ar, or simple typos; and lots of references[1]. By Extension, I included curl{e}y brackets, but not tag brack<e>ts, which are not seenin modern legal documents. +These.are.properly.separated.even.U.S.A., and multiple punctuations are properly ignored.
  • Basic patterns
    • A. Multiple

    • B. Choices

    • -ABC-DEF-

    • -A-B-C-D-

    • -1-2-3-4-

    • -test-

    • .ABC.DEF.

    • .AB.CD.EF.D.

    • .A.B.C.D.E.

    • .123.456.789.

    • .12.34.56.78.

    • .1.2.3.4.

    • cod3 var1aBl3s

    • test.U.S.A.test

  • We'd want hyphenated words in cases when large words are broken for wrapping in tight column news papers/megazines, while we can still properly separate numbers such as "30-35 pages".
  • Non-Latin character are separated per character:
    • 出典: フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』
    • ウィキペディアには現在この名前の項目はありません。

Acceptable failed cases:

  • [E]xpected: "[" is considered external "wrapper/enclosure", while the internal "wrappers" are included so that they can be further processed/removed in the future.
  • test.U.S.A.test: this happens when no space trailing textContents of a block-level elemetn in HTML files.
  • 『ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』: mixed languages
  • CamelCasing not separated, but can be easily separated in "post-processing step, even though snake_casing works fine by happenstance.
  • cod3 var1aBl3s: mixing letters and numbers. It's not intentional, but not a big deal when the side-effect is new word is always started with a number.
Submitted by Bryan Ho - a day ago