Regular Expressions 101

Negative Lookbehind(?<!\S)

\Sany character that is not Unicode whitespace

Non-Capturing Group(?:-\w+(?:-\w+)*|\w+(?:-\w+)*-)

1st Alternative-\w+(?:-\w+)*

-the literal - (45₁₀ / 55₈ / 2D₁₆)

\w+a Unicode word character, repeated at least once

Non-Capturing Group(?:-\w+)*

*repeats the group contents below any number of times:

-the literal - (45₁₀ / 55₈ / 2D₁₆)

\w+a Unicode word character, repeated at least once

2nd Alternative\w+(?:-\w+)*-

\w+a Unicode word character, repeated at least once

Non-Capturing Group(?:-\w+)*

*repeats the group contents below any number of times:

-the literal - (45₁₀ / 55₈ / 2D₁₆)

\w+a Unicode word character, repeated at least once

-the literal - (45₁₀ / 55₈ / 2D₁₆)

Negative Lookahead(?!\S)

\Sany character that is not Unicode whitespace

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)(?:-\w+(?:-\w+)*|\w+(?:-\w+)*-)(?!\S)

New

here are some word sub-words -word1 word2- sub-word2 word3- -word4
-word5 example
word6-
word7-
another one -word8
-word9

a-b-c-
-some-
sugar-free
sugar-free-
-sugar-free

Substitution

here are some word sub-words -word1 word2- sub-word2 word3- -word4
-word5 example
word6-
word7-
another one -word8
-word9

a-b-c-
-some-
sugar-free
sugar-free-
-sugar-free