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I would like to extract sentences with the word "flung" in the whole text.
For example, in the following text, I'd like to extract the sentence "It was exactly as if a hand had clutched them in the centre and flung them aside." using regular expression.
I tried to use this .*? flung (?<sub>.*?)\., but it starts searching from the beginning of the line.
How could I solve the problem?
As she did so, a most extraordinary thing happened. The bed-clothes gathered themselves together, leapt up suddenly into a sort of peak, and then jumped headlong over the bottom rail. It was exactly as if a hand had clutched them in the centre and flung them aside. Immediately after, .........
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To expand the regex to match a complete line, add ‹ . * › at both ends. The dot-asterisk sequences match zero or more characters within the current line.
If we want to improve the first example to match whole words only, we would need to use \b(cat|dog)\b. This tells the regex engine to find a word boundary, then either cat or dog, and then another word boundary.
The regex operation “^. *?.?!;” can be used to search for the first sentence in the text. The expression basically returns all the text before a period, question mark, exclamation mark, or a semicolon, that follows an empty white space. Here is an example script that can be used to return the first sentence in a text.
\f stands for form feed, which is a special character used to instruct the printer to start a new page.
Here you go,
[^.]* flung [^.]*\.
DEMO
OR
[^.?!]*(?<=[.?\s!])flung(?=[\s.?!])[^.?!]*[.?!]
DEMO
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