Word boundary with regex - cannot extract all words

Question

I need extract double Male-Cat:

a = \"Male-Cat Male-Cat Male-Cat-Female\"
b = re.findall(r\'(?:\\s|^)Male-Cat(?:\\s|$)\', a)
print (b)
[\'Male-C         


        

Answer 1

Use lookarounds to extract words inside whitespace boundaries:

r'(?<!\S)Male-Cat(?!\S)'

See the online regex demo

Details

• (?<!\S) - a whitespace or start of string must appear immediately to the left of the current location
• Male-Cat - the term to search for
• (?!\S) - a whitespace or end of string must appear immediately to the right of the current location

Since (?<!\S) and (?!\S) are zero-width assertions, the whitespace won't be consumed, and consecutive matches will get found.