On Thu, 6 Aug 2009, David Byron wrote: > > > My goal is to remove all instances of the word "the" (and any > > > surrounding whitespace) from a string.
That is not quite what you say later: > > I've stuck with this loop and think it's probably OK. The case I'm > > struggling with is this one: > > > > "foo The foo" In that case, you don't want to remove *any* surrounding whitespace, do you? It seems to me that you want to remove "the" and *either* preceding whitespace *or* following whitespace, but not both. Perhaps it's easiest to split it up into the different cases: ^the\s+|\s+the$|\s+the(?=\s+) Note the lookahead to check for whitespace, but not include it in the removal. This is just a quick off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion. It does not, of course, pack up multiple following whitespace into a single one, but you could do that with something like \s+the\s*(?=\s) I think. Philip -- Philip Hazel -- ## List details at http://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/pcre-dev
