Apostrophe as part of a word with regexp in MATLAB

Question

I am working on something in MATLAB that processes text. For this I need my regular expression to work properly.

So far I have this regexp below, which works for almost everything, but I would like to add something to it so that it reads an apostrophe as a part of a word.

V1 = regexp(inpstr,'\w*[^a-zA-Z0-9\ _\ -\ "\ *\f\n\r\t\v\x20]?','match');

So, my an examplary question is: If I have a string:

'Hi, let's play some ball.'

I would like the regexp to give me 'Hi,' - 'let's' - 'play' - 'some' - 'ball.'

and currently it gives me 'Hi,' - 'let' - 's' - 'play' - 'some' - 'ball.'

I guess the problem is I can't just add \ ' to the regexp because of MATLABs use of '. I tried just adding it and this happened: ??? Error: File: TestScript.m Line: 13 Column: 38 The input character is not valid in MATLAB statements or expressions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated =)

Answer 1

The solution to my problem was this:

V1 = regexp(inpstr,'\w*[\'']*[^\_\-\"\*\s]*','match')

Basically, in between [ ] you put characters you want to express and in between [^ ] you put characters you want to skip. Also, \s was a shortcut for all whitespace.

Answer 2

try this

\w*[^a-zA-Z0-9\ _\ -\ '\ "\ *\f\n\r\t\v\x20]?