Question

I need a rather complicated regular expression that will select words with one space between them and that can include the ‘-‘ symbol in them, it should not however select continuous whitespace.

'KENEDY JOHN G JR E'                  'example'                 'D-54'

I have tried the following regular expression:

\'([\s\w-]+)\'

but it selects continuous whitespace which I don’t want it to do.

I want the expression to select

'KENEDY JOHN G JR E'
'example'
'D-54'

Answer 1

Perhaps,

\'([\w-]+(?:\s[\w-]+)*)\'

?

EDIT

If leading/trailing dashes (on the word boundaries) are not allowed, this should read:

/\'(\w+(?:[\s-]\w+)*)\'/