A word boundary assertion checks if the current position in the string is a word boundary. A word boundary is where the next character is a word character and the previous character is not a word character, or vice versa.
Syntax
\b
\B
Description
\b asserts that the current position in the string is a word boundary. \B negates the assertion: it asserts that the current position is not a word boundary. Both are assertions, so unlike other character escapes or character class escapes, \b and \B don't consume any characters.
A word character includes the following:
- Letters (A–Z, a–z), numbers (0–9), and underscore (_).
- If the regex is Unicode-aware and the
iflag is set, other Unicode characters that get canonicalized to one of the characters above through case folding.
Word characters are also matched by the \w character class escape.
Out-of-bounds input positions are considered non-word characters. For example, the following are successful matches:
/\ba/.exec("abc");
/c\b/.exec("abc");
/\B /.exec(" abc");
/ \B/.exec("abc ");
Examples
Detecting words
The following example detects if a string contains the word "thanks" or "thank you":
function hasThanks(str) {
return /\b(thanks|thank you)\b/i.test(str);
}
hasThanks("Thanks! You helped me a lot."); // true
hasThanks("Just want to say thank you for all your work."); // true
hasThanks("Thanksgiving is around the corner."); // false
Warning: Not all languages have clearly defined word boundaries. If you are working with languages like Chinese or Thai, where there are no whitespace separators, use a more advanced library like Intl.Segmenter to search for words instead.