Looking for a regular expression

[Stephen Wood]

This is a variation on the repeated word problem.

I am trying -- thus far without success -- to craft a regular expression to
detect repeated words. However, in this expression, I need to allow for an
optional comma and space between the repeated words and to capture the
repeated word in a backreference.

Any regex junkies out there know how to do this?

Thanks,

Stephen

 

[Brian Davis]

I am not sure that I fully understand what you need, but see if this is a
step in the right direction:

(?<word>\b\w+\b),? \k<word>\b


Brian Davis
http://www.knowdotnet.com

 

[Stephen Wood]

Thanks, Brian.

What I'm looking for is something that, given the following input text --

"bells, bells"

-- or --

"bells bells"

would detect the word repetition in both cases.

I tried the expression you supplied, and it does the trick.

Thanks,

Stephen