Question

I’m using the following regular expression to find the exact occurrences in infinitives. Flag is global.

(?!to )(?<!\w) (' + word_to_search + ') (?!\w)

To give example of what I’m trying to achieve

• looking for out should not bring : to outlaw
• looking for out could bring : to be out of line
• looking for to should not bring : to etc. just because it matches the first to

I’ve already done these steps, however, to cross out/off should be in the result list too. Is there any way to create an exception without compromising what I have achieved?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I’m still not sure I understand the question. You want to match something that looks like an infinitive verb phrase and contains the whole word word_to_search? Try this:

"\\bto\\s(?:\\w+[\\s/])*" + word_to_search + "\\b"

Remember, when you create a regex in the form of a string literal, you have to escape the backslashes. If you tried to use “\b” to specify a word boundary, it would have been interpreted as a backspace.