Question

I know there are similar questions, however the last question only stated if a word has all of the vowels in the word. What I am trying to do is find if a word has its vowels in alphabetical order. For example the words: almost, various, etc.

I have tried many different solutions however I cannot get to this work.

Things like:

(a[^eiou]*)?(e[^aiou]*)?(i[^aeou]*)?(o[^aeio]*u)?

and

a[^eiou]*e[^aiou]*i[^aeou]*o[^aeio]*u

but these do not work.

Answer 1

Your first try is not too far, try this:

\b[^aeiou]*(?:a[^eiou]*)?(?:e[^aiou]*)?(?:i[^aeou]*)?(?:o[^aeiu]*)?u?[^aeio]*\b

See it here on Regexr.

I added:

\b word boundaries to ensure that the complete word is matched

[^aeiou]* at the beginning to match non vowels before the first “a”

(?:o[^aeio]*)?u? changed the last part a bit to make the “o” optional