Regex - Match words with shared spaces

Question

How do I match specified words in a sentence? If I have the sentence "lord of the rings" and want to remove "of" and "the" how do I write the regex?

I don't want it to match anything in for example "don't match them" or "don't match often". It should match when "the" or "of" is in the beginning or end of the row as well.

The problem I encountered is when the words follow each other like in the example with "lord of the rings". When they share a space so to say.

The best I could manage is something like this:

/^(the|of) | (the|of)$| (of|the) /gmi

But it doesn't solve all my problems.

Answer 1

This is a perfect task for word boundaries

\b(of|the)\b

Answer 2

You can use the lookahead group (?= ) [doc]:

/^(the|of) | (the|of)$| (of|the)(?= )/gmi

Demo : https://regex101.com/r/Bo4Ur1/1