Regular expression matching (Javascript)

Question

I've got the following string: |Africa||Africans||African Society||Go Africa Go||Mafricano||Go Mafricano Go||West Africa|.

I am trying to write a regular expression that only matches terms that include the word Africa or any deriative of it (meaning yes to all terms above except for |Mafricano| and |Go Mafricano Go|. Each term is enclosed between two |.

Right now I've come up with: /\|[^\|]*africa[^\|]*\|/gi, which says:

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1. \| Match |

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2. [^\|]* Match zero to unlimited instances of any character except |

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3. africa Match africa literally

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4. [^\|]* Match zero to unlimited instances of any character except |

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5. \| Match |

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I've tried inserting ((?:\s)|(?!\w)) to make it /\|[^\|]*((?:\s)|(?!\w))africa[^\|]*\|/gi. Although it succeeds in excluding |Mafricano| and |Go Mafricano Go|, it also excludes all other entries except for |West Africa| and |Go Africa Go|. So that is good but it needs to include all single word Africa and its derived forms too.

Can anybody help me?

• Kai: why don't you use replace ? It should be much more easier.
• AKG: @JhKaiz, @AvinashRaj: I need an array of all matched terms, so I'll be using the match() function

Answer 1

You can use this regex

[^|]*\bAfrica[a-z]*\b[^|]*

DEMO

var str = "|Africa||Africans||African Society||Go Africa Go||Mafricano||Go Mafricano Go||West Africa|";
var arr = str.match(/[^|]*\bAfrica[a-z]*\b[^|]*/g);
console.log(arr); // ["Africa", "Africans", "African Society", "Go Africa Go", "West Africa"] 

Answer 2

I think you want something like this,

\|(?:(?!Mafrica|\|).)*?africa(?:(?!Mafrica|\|).)*?\|

DEMO

> "|Africa||Africans||African Society||Go Africa Go||Mafricano||Go Mafricano Go||West Africa|".match(/\|(?:(?!Mafrica|\|).)*?africa(?:(?!Mafrica|\|).)*?\|/gi);
[ '|Africa|',
 '|Africans|',
 '|African Society|',
 '|Go Africa Go|',
 '|West Africa|' ]

Don't forget to turn on the i modifier to do a case insensitive match.

Explanation:

\| '|'
(?: group, but do not capture (0 or more
 times):
 (?! look ahead to see if there is not:
 Mafrica 'Mafrica'
 | OR
 \| '|'
 ) end of look-ahead
 . any character except \n
)*? end of grouping
africa 'africa'
(?: group, but do not capture (0 or more
 times):
 (?! look ahead to see if there is not:
 Mafrica 'Mafrica'
 | OR
 \| '|'
 ) end of look-ahead
 . any character except \n
)*? end of grouping
\| '|'

• AKG: The entries are way more diverse and more random than Mafricano, so this would not scale for other entries. Thanks though.
• AKG: My apologies for that. I thought that was implied.
• Avinash Raj: You're welcome.. Next time don't forget to to post a question with detailed explanation on very first.