Regular Expressions 101

\s*any whitespace character, repeated any number of times

Group 1(\.+|[[:punct:]])

1st Alternative\.+

\.+the literal . (46₁₀ / 56₈ / 2E₁₆) , repeated at least once

2nd Alternative[[:punct:]]

Character Class[[:punct:]]

[:punct:]a punctuation character [!"#$%&'()*+,\-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~]

Negative Lookbehind(?<!\b['’]\b)

\ban ASCII word boundary

Character Class['’]

'the literal ' (39₁₀ / 47₈ / 27₁₆)

’the literal ’ (8217₁₀ / 20031₈ / 2019₁₆)

\ban ASCII word boundary

\s*any whitespace character, repeated any number of times

Global pattern flags

g modifier: global. Finds all matches instead of stopping after the first

m modifier: multiline. Causes ^ and $ to match the start and end of each line, not only the start and end of the string

Detailed match information will be displayed here automatically.

25 tokens

Regular Expression

\s*(\.+|[[:punct:]])(?<!\b['’]\b)\s*

New

I want: spaces around all these marks;:!?.but i didn’t want it there in didn't

I want: spaces around all these marks;:!?.but i didn’t want it there in didn't