Question

I am trying to replace a string that is surrounded by non word characters.

My target string is

;ab.ab,abb...

And I want to get result of

;[ab].[ab],abb...

Here is my pattern

s/([^\w]+)(ab)([^\w]+)/$1[$2]$3/g

But it does not replace second match because first match is ;ab. and second match is done on tail of ab,abb…

Any ideas?

Answer 1

How about just use the word-boundary?

s/\b(ab)\b/[$1]/g