Regex: Match whole word in string PHP

Question

My sample string is

Indian India's India.

I want to match only "India" as a whole word. My regular expression is /\b(india)\b/i.

But this is giving me 2 matches. one in "India's" and other in last word.

To avoid getting India in India's, I used this regex /\b(india)[^'a-z]\b/i. But this regex is matching "India." (Notice the dot)

I only want to match India. How can I achieve this?

I am doing this in PHP.

Answer 1

You can use the following regex

\bIndia(?=$|\s)

• (?=$|\s) Positive Lookahead $ assert position at end of a line or \s match any white space character [\r\n\t\f ]

If you want to allow ,(comma) or .(dot) then you can simply use

\bIndia(?=[.,]|$|\s)

Regex

Answer 2

You need to just modify the regex:

\b(India)\b(?!\')