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Find a word that is not contained in other words

Last post 03-10-2010, 10:55 PM by Aussie Susan. 1 replies.
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  •  03-10-2010, 7:39 PM 60674

    Find a word that is not contained in other words

    Hi All,

    I hope someone out there can give me some ideas on this one.  I'm using a PCRE environment to search html and URLs for words.  But in some cases I'm looking for a word that could contain other words.  I'm not interested in the other words.  Just my word.  So, for example...

    My word is "asses". Of the following URLs I only want to match the first.

    1.  http://mysite.com/asses.html
    2.  http://mysite.com/assessments.html
    3.  http://mysite.com/biasses.html
    4.  http://mysite.com/glasses.html
    5.  http://mysite.com/gasses.html
    6.  http://mysite.com/bypasses.html
    7.  http://mysite.com/molasses.html
    8.  http://mysite.com/reassessments.html
    9.  http://mysite.com/crassest.html
    10.http://mysite.com/assessor.html  

    I've looked a little at using negating lookarounds.  So, I could exclude number 2 and 8 by doing this:

    asses(?!sment)

    But, excluding everything in this list in a single expression using lookarounds seems tedious and error prone.  I'm looking for a way to have one, clean expression that gets the correct word but excludes a list of other words.  This site shows a list of words that contain the word "asses".   http://www.morewords.com/contains/asses/

    I don't necessarily need to exclude ALL of them but certainly the most common ones.  Also, performance is a concern.  So, it has to be something that is going to perform pretty well.  Is it possible?  Is there a way to do it with word boundaries?

    Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated!

    Thanks,

     Eric

    P.S. You may have guessed that I'm working on a content filter (of sorts).  I'm looking for "asses" in an attempt to exclude without over-filtering. 

  •  03-10-2010, 10:55 PM 60675 in reply to 60674

    Re: Find a word that is not contained in other words

    Try:

    \basses\b

    You may also want the "Ignore Case" option set.

    Susan

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