r/regex • u/Beautiful-Log5632 • Aug 31 '26

Include underscore in ripgrep word boundary

\bWORD\b doesn't match _WORD_ because \b doesn't include _ so I miss a lot of matches. Is there something else I can use like \b that works like that?

3 Upvotes

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3

u/michaelpaoli Sep 01 '26

\b doesn't match any characters, but rather boundary condition, between word and non-word characters (and also \A ^ $ \z).

So, what exactly are you wanting to match?

1

u/cscottnet Aug 31 '26 edited Sep 01 '26

(\b_?)WORD(_?\b)

1

u/mfb- Sep 01 '26

Put things in ` to avoid reddit interpreting it as its own formatting.

(\b_?)WORD(_?\b)

The brackets don't really do anything here.

\b_?WORD_?\b works as well. Or (\b|_)WORD(\b|_) depending on what should happen with STUFF_WORD_STUFF

2

u/cscottnet Sep 01 '26

Or \b_*WORD_*\b -- depends on exactly what OP was trying to achieve. You can use lookahead/lookbehind if they didn't want the underscores to appear in $0.

1

u/jeffcgroves Sep 01 '26

[\b_] as a character class?