What regex pattern will match a whole word that contains certain characters?

Question

I want to match whole words that contain certain letters/characters. For example the pattern would match all words that contain the letter l and a, such as car, patrol, left, etc. but it wouldn't match words like boom, turnover, digit, etc.

Answer 1

A pattern like this should work:

\b(?=\w*[al])\w+\b

This will match one or more 'word' characters (letters, digits, or underscores) only of it contains an a or l character. The \b around it will match the boundary of that word (e.g. where the next character is a non-word character), so it will capture the entire word.