[TxMt] find with "match entire word"

[Jay Soffian]

On Jul 18, 2007, at 12:37 PM, Craig Schmidt wrote:

> I've been trying to bracket the variable with the "non word  
> character", so I search for the regular expression \Wx\W
>
> This excludes xbar, and foox. However, this isn't quite the same as  
> matching just the word, as the find dialog also selects the  
> previous and next character, matching the \W. I can't use it in a  
> replace, for example.  Is there some cleaner way of doing this?

You need to employ a zero-width assertion/anchor. This is a way of  
anchoring/matching w/o including the match itself. Examples are (from  
the Oniguruma help):

   ^       beginning of the line
   $       end of the line
   \b      word boundary
   \B      not word boundary
   \A      beginning of string
   \Z      end of string, or before newline at the end
   \z      end of string

There is also a general mechanism:

   (?=subexp)         look-ahead
   (?!subexp)         negative look-ahead
   (?<=subexp)        look-behind
   (?<!subexp)        negative look-behind

The perl regular expression engine is sufficiently similar to  
Oniguruma that you may find the "perlre" man page helpful. I also  
highly recommend Mastering Regular Expressions.

To answer your specific question, you probably want \bx\b

j.