How to find words containing a certain letter with Regular Expressions?

Question

I need a regular expression to find any words containing the letter "y".

This was my idea:

/\bw*[y]\w*\b/

a word boundary, something or nothing, y, something or nothing, word boundary.
It works for the first word, but not for the next one.

How do I get all the words containing a y within a string?

Answer 1

Not knowing what language you're using and guessing based on the syntax of your attempt, this should work:

/\b\w*[Yy]\w*\b/g

Without the "g" (for "global") option you'll only get the first match. Note also this matches on "y" in both upper and lower case.

Answer 2

maybe try this:

[a-zA-Z]*y[a-zA-Z]*

This finds all words that have the letter 'y'.

I hope I helped. I tested it on http://regexpal.com/