I have a particular regular expression:
#\b[a-z0-9-_%"]+\b#gi
I have the following test string I am applying that regex filter to:
abc def ghi jkl mno %%car% __car_ tall-person "thing" 20% %30%
However, the detected word boundaries are as follows (square brackets represent boundaries):
[abc] [def] [ghi] [jkl] [mno] %%[car%] [__car_] [tall-person] "[thing"] [20%] %[30%]
So, certain types of punctuation ("_") are recognized at both the beginning and end of the word as "word characters." On the other hand, other types ("%" or double quotes) are ignored when they are at the beginning of the word. Why is this?
In word boundary, word means
\w
meta character (in most regular expression engine):[A-Za-z0-9_]
;%
,"
is not in that characters: match word boundary.I think you don't need to use word boundary: