Question

So I want to find the string “to” in a string, but only when it is standalone. It could be at the beginning of the string, as in “to do this”, so I can’t search ” to “.

What I want to do is say, if there is a character behind “to”, it cannot be \w. How do I do that?

Answer 1

Try word boudaries. It matches the beginning and the end of the searched pattern

\bto\b

This is exaclty what you want to say, i.e.

So what exactly is it that \b matches? Regular expression engines do not understand English, or any language for that matter, and so they don’t know what word boundaries are. \b simply matches a location between characters that are usually parts of words (alphanumeric characters and underscore, text that would be matched by \w) and anything else (text that would be matched by \W).

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