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r'((?:\S+\s+){0,3}\bwhite\b\s*(?:\S+\s+){0,3})

The result of above regex for below sentence is

sentence = This is a white floral garment.
result = This is a white floral

But I want the result as 

wanted result = This is a white floral garment

I want 3 words before and after the white word. If there are not three word after white than at least get all which are present there.

Awaish Kumar
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4 Answers4

4

You can fix it by adding a word boundary \b to the subattern for words after white and making the space optional

((?:\S+\s+){0,3}\bwhite\b\s*(?:\S+\b\s*){0,3})

Demo

mrzasa
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0

try this

((?:\S+\s+){3,}\bwhite\b\s*(?:\S+\b\s*){3,})

(?:\S+\s+){3,}\bwhite\b minimum 3 words before the word 'white'

s*(?:\S+\b\s*){3,} after minimum 3 word

Demo

AssenKhan
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Perhaps you could match one or more word characters \w+ followed by a whitespace character \s and repeat that 3 times {3} to match 3 words before the word "white".

Then match "white" and after that match a whitespace character and one or more times a word character and repeat that 0 - 3 times {0,3} so if there are 3 or less words following you would match that.

(?:\w+\s){3}white(?:\s\w+){0,3}

The fourth bird
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I used the above, but had issues if a comma came after the target word.

Playing around with the regex, this seemed to work on sentences like:

I want a white floral garment, etc.

((?:\S+\s+){0,3}\bwhite\b\w*(?:\W+\b\w*){0,3})
Victor Palacios
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