Question

I’m trying to send a regex to a mongo db that will match a comma separated value.

For example ‘aaa’ should match:

aaa, ancient, pattern, discipleship, faithful, followers         matches
lowers,aaa, gospel, righteousness, strengthen, family       matches
lowers, aaa , gospel, righteousness, strengthen, family     matches
lowers, goaaaspel, righteousness, strengthen, family        no match
lowers, aaaspel, righteousness, strengthen, family          no match
lowers, gospel aaa truth, righteousness, strengthen         no match
lowers, gospel aaa, righteousness, strengthen, family       no match
lowers, gospel, righteousness, strengthen, family aaa        no match
lowers, gospel, righteousness, strengthen, family, aaa       matches

Thanks.

Answer 1

This seems to work on the attached example:

(?<=,|^)(\s*)aaa(?=\s*,|\s*$)

It basically means ‘aaa’ which has line start or comma before it and line end or comma after.
It will capture leading whitespace though, but you can fix that with grouping.