RegEx consecutive matches
javascript, regex
Solution
JavaScript's regular expressions (and most others too) support the `\b` escape sequence, which matches (zero-width) word boundaries. In your expression, simply replace the two `\s` with `\b` and it will work.
Note that "word boundary" also applies around dashes, dots, etc. So `this-test - more.` will have boundaries at: `|this|-|test| - |more|.` Usually this is desirable, but it is a difference in behaviour from `\s` which is worth knowing about.
As noted by Sam in the comments, a word boundary is identified as:
(^\w|\w\W|\W\w|\w$)
that is, a non-word character followed by a word character, or a word character followed by a non-word character, where the start and end of the string are taken as non-word characters. (but note that `\b` is zero-width, so it isn't just a shorthand for that expression)
Problem
I have this regex in Javascript to remove words with 3 letters or less: ``` srcText = srcText.replace(/\s[a-z]{1,3}\s/gi,''); ``` It works but when two consecutives matches are found, the 2nd isn't affected: Ex.: "... this is one sample of a text ... " ' one ' and ' a ' won't be affected unless I run the code one more time: ``` srcText = srcText.replace(/\s[a-z]{1,3}\s/gi,''); ``` So I'd have to run the code n times, n being the consecutives matches in srcText. for testing purpose: http://regexpal.com/ sample text: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/521/521-0.txt (say, 4th paragraph) Is my regex missing something or javascript won't allow this kind of recursiveness?