Question

In JavaScript:

"ab abc cab ab ab".replace(/\bab\b/g, "AB");

correctly gives me:

"AB abc cab AB AB"

When I use utf-8 characters though:

"αβ αβγ γαβ αβ αβ".replace(/\bαβ\b/g, "AB");

the word boundary operator doesn’t seem to work:

"αβ αβγ γαβ αβ αβ"

Is there a solution to this?

Answer 1

The word boundary assertion does only match if a word character is not preceded or followed by another word character (so .\b. is equal to \W\w and \w\W). And \w is defined as [A-Za-z0-9_]. So \w doesn’t match greek characters. And thus you cannot use \b for this case.

What you could do instead is to use this:

"αβ αβγ γαβ αβ αβ".replace(/(^|\s)αβ(?=\s|$)/g, "$1AB")