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Asked: 2026-06-04T18:07:56+00:00

I’m completely unexperienced with regex, so I apologise if this is a simple question,

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I’m completely unexperienced with regex, so I apologise if this is a simple question, but I’ve been unable to find any answers anywhere. I’m trying to match strings of the form [some numbers] [some letters] such as 123 apples but I don’t want to match them when they are preceeded by the word about (e.g. about 10 apples should not match).

I’ve tried using (?<!about )(\d[,\.\d]*) ([a-zA-Z]+) but that obviously doesn’t work as it just moves the match on somewhat (such that about 12 apples matches as 2 apples). What can I do to solve this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve had this problem before. Try this:

    (?<!about )(\b\d[,\.\d]*\b) ([a-zA-Z]+)

    The \b matches a zero-character word boundary (space followed by alphanumeric or vice-versa). It will refuse to match “about 123 apples” as “23 apples”, because there’s no word boundary immediately before the “2”.

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