regex last character of a WORD
I'm attempting to match the last character in a WORD.
A WORD is a sequence of non-whitespace characters '[^\n\r\t\f ]', or an empty line matching ^$.
The expression I made to do this is: "[^ \n\t\r\f]\(?:[ \$\n\t\r\f]\)"
The regex matches a non-whitespace character that follows a whitespace character or the end of the line.
But I don't know how to stop it from excluding the following whitespace character from the result and why it doesn't seem to capture a character preceding the end of the line.
Using the string "Hi World!", I would expect: the "i" and "!" to be captured.
Instead I get: "i ".
What steps can I take to solve this problem?
"Word" that is a sequence of non-whitespace characters scenario
Note that a non-capturing group (?:...)
in [^ \n\t\r\f](?:[ \$\n\t\r\f])
still matches (consumes) the whitespace char (thus, it becomes a part of the match) and it does not match at the end of the string as the $
symbol is not a string end anchor inside a character class, it is parsed as a literal $
symbol.
You may use
\S(?!\S)
See the regex demo
The \S
matches a non-whitespace char that is not followed with a non-whitespace char (due to the (?!\S)
negative lookahead).
General "word" case
If a word consists of just letters, digits and underscores, that is, if it is matched with \w+
, you may simply use
\w\b
Here, \w
matches a "word" char, and the word boundary asserts there is no word char right after.
See another regex demo.