How to match a word with no special character at front and back

Question

I am trying to match a word which has no special characters attached at both front and back. The regex I have written is /\btest\b/gi I have added two word boundaries at front and back for matching the exact word. The sample text is :

This is a test.
The testing was good.
The tester was bad.
package.test.com
[email protected]
Regex-test-is tough
"rm/[email protected]&quot
/Users/dattem/Desktop/DevCenter/test/ssl/
The test is today.
Name -test one

I want to match the test word of only first and last two lines. https://regex101.com/r/AEfzUw/4

Answer 1

The following regex will match only the first and last 2 lines in your cases:

(?<=[\s\t-])test(?=[\s\.\t])

https://regex101.com/r/RCfs8l/1

It uses positive lookbehind and lookahead:

• (?<=[\s\t-]) a space, tab or dash
• test test
• (?=[\s\.\t]) followed by a space, a dot or tab

Answer 2

This does the trick:

(?<= )test\b|\btest(?= )

The word test either preceded or followed by a space. I don't think there is a way to avoid repeating the word test in the regex.