Regular Expressions: Positive Lookahead and Word Border question

Posted by Inf.S on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Inf.S
Published on 2010-03-18T18:20:41Z Indexed on 2010/03/18 18:31 UTC
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regular-expressions

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regex

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pattern-matching

Hello again Stackoverflow people!

Assume I have these words: smartphones, smartphone

I want to match the substring "phone" from within them. However, in both case, I want only "phone" to be returned, not "phones" in the first case. In addition to this, I want matches only if the word "phone" is a suffix only, such that:

fonephonetics (just an example) is not matched.

I assumed that the regex

(phone([?=s])?)\b

would give me what I need, but it is currently matching "phones" and "phone", but not the "fonephonetics" one. I don't need "phones". I want "phone" for both cases.

Any ideas about what is wrong, and what I can do?

Thank you in advance!

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