[[:>:]] or [[:<:]] don't match
You can use \b(?<=d)
or \b(?=d)
instead. In any case PCRE engine converts [[:<:]]
to \b(?=\w)
and [[:>:]]
to \b(?<=\w)
before starting the match.
It is a bug, because these constructs (starting word boundary, [[:<:]]
, and ending [[:>:]]
word boundary) are supported by the PCRE library itself:
COMPATIBILITY FEATURE FOR WORD BOUNDARIES In the POSIX.2 compliant library that was included in 4.4BSD Unix, the ugly syntax [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] is used for matching "start of word" and "end of word". PCRE treats these items as follows: [[:<:]] is converted to \b(?=\w) [[:>:]] is converted to \b(?<=\w) Only these exact character sequences are recognized. A sequence such as [a[:<:]b] provokes error for an unrecognized POSIX class name. This support is not compatible with Perl. It is provided to help migrations from other environments, and is best not used in any new patterns. Note that \b matches at the start and the end of a word (see "Simple asser- tions" above), and in a Perl-style pattern the preceding or following character normally shows which is wanted, without the need for the assertions that are used above in order to give exactly the POSIX be- haviour.
When used in PHP code, it works:
if (preg_match_all('/[[:<:]]home[[:>:]]/', 'homeless and home', $m))
{
print_r($m[0]);
}
finds Array ( [0] => home)
. See the online PHP demo.
So, it is the regex101.com developer team that decided (or forgot) to include support for these paired word boundaries.
At regex101.com, instead, use \b
word boundaries (both as starting and ending ones) that are supported by all 4 regex101.com regex engines: PCRE, JS, Python and Go.
These word boundaries are mostly supported by POSIX-like engines, see this PostgreSQL regex demo, for example. The [[:<:]]HR[[:>:]]
regex finds a match in Head of HR
, but finds no match in <A HREF="some.html
and CHROME
.
Other regex engines that support [[:<:]]
and [[:>:]]
word boundaries are base R (gsub
with no perl=TRUE
argument, e.g.) and MySQL.
In Tcl regex, there is \m
for [[:<:]]
(starting word boundary) and \M
for ending word boundary ([[:>:]]
).