Question

I am stuck in a problem with an application. I have following lines of text :

1) hi {my|your|his} name is {stacker|monster|overflow}
2) hi {my|your|his} job can be to {stacker|monster|overflow}
3) hi {my|your|his} car {stacker|monster|overflow}

What I want :

on the click of a button select and replace those words which do not have { or } just before or after the word i.e. in line 1 or 3 we do not have any such word. In line 2 we have “can” and “be”.

I used substrings to check for { or } but it does not work. I thought there might be a regex to check for such words?

Thanks and happy new year. Quite sweet that you guys are helping on new year day 🙂

Answer 1

(?<![{}]\s+|\{[^{}]*)\b\w+\b(?!\s+[{}]|[^{}]*\})

does this.

Explanation:

(?<!        # Assert that we can't match this before the current position:
 [{}]\s*    # Any directly adjacent brace (plus optional whitespace)
|           # or
 \{[^{}]*   # an opening brace before any other brace.
)
\b\w+\b     # Match an entire word
(?!         # Assert that we can't match this after the current position:
 \s*[{}]    # Any directly adjacent brace (plus optional whitespace)
|           # or
 [^{}]*\}   # a closing brace before any other brace.
)

Caveat: This fails if braces can be nested.