Replacing a word with another word without replacing another word which contains a similar substring in the same sentence in Javascript

Question

I'm trying to replace a word with another word, specifically "has" with "had". But the string contains the word "hash" which has the substring "has" so it also gets replaced. What can I do to fix this?

function replace() {
    sentence = sentence.replaceAll("has", "had");
}

One simple way of solving it is to replace ' has ' (with space before and after) with ' had '. A maybe better way would be using `replace()` with a RegExp like `/\bhas\b/g`. — secan, Jul 26 '21 at 07:47

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 26 '21 at 07:44

Place word boundaries around the word to be replaced:

var input = "A man who has an appetite ate hashed browns";
var output = input.replace(/\bhas\b/g, "had");
console.log(output);

Note that I used regular replace along with the /g global flag. This should have the same behavior as using replaceAll.

Replacing a word with another word without replacing another word which contains a similar substring in the same sentence in Javascript

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