how to extract part of a sentence that ends in a word but only up to a certain amount of words to th-CodePudding

^ho..ital\s (?:(?:\b[a-zA-Z_'] \b)[ ]*){1,5}$

it extracts any senetence that starts with the word hospital OR hopital and only includes the sentence if it has up to 5 words to the right.

How do I modify the the regex to make it work from when the words ENDS in hospital OR hopital and includes up to 5 words to the left?

CodePudding user response：

You can use

^(?:[a-zA-Z_']   ){1,5}hos?pital$

See the regex demo. In case you are not using multiline texts, you may replace the literal space with \s in the pattern.

Details:

^ - start of string
(?:[a-zA-Z_'] ){1,5} - one to five occurrences of
- [a-zA-Z_'] - one or more letters, underscores or ' chars
- - one or more spaces
hos?pital - hospital or hopital
$ - end of string.