Regex to match words of a certain length

I think you want \b\w{1,10}\b. The \b matches a word boundary.

Of course, you could also replace the \b and do ^\w{1,10}$. This will match a word of at most 10 characters as long as its the only contents of the string. I think this is what you were doing before.

Since it's Java, you'll actually have to escape the backslashes: "\\b\\w{1,10}\\b". You probably knew this already, but it's gotten me before.

Length of characters to be matched.

{n,m}  n <= length <= m
{n}    length == n
{n,}   length >= n

And by default, the engine is greedy to match this pattern. For example, if the input is 123456789, \d{2,5} will match 12345 which is with length 5.

If you want the engine returns when length of 2 matched, use \d{2,5}?

^\w{0,10}$ # allows words of up to 10 characters.
^\w{5,}$   # allows words of more than 4 characters.
^\w{5,10}$ # allows words of between 5 and 10 characters.