Does bash support word boundary regular expressions?

Question

I am trying to match on the presence of a word in a list before adding that word again (to avoid duplicates). I am using bash 4.2.24 and am trying the below:

Answer 1

I've used the following to match word boundaries on older systems. The key is to wrap $foo with spaces since [^[:alpha:]] will not match words at the beginning or end of the list.

[[ " $foo " =~ [^[:alpha:]]myword[^[:alpha:]] ]]

Tweak the character class as needed based on the expected contents of myword, otherwise this may not be good solution.