As the title says , I need to find two specific words in a sentence. But they can be in any order and any casing. How do I go about doing this using regex?
For example, I need to extract the words test and long from the following sentence whether the word test comes first or long comes.
This is a very long sentence used as a test
UPDATE: What I did not mention in the first part is that it needs to be case insensitive as well.
Use a capturing group if you want to extract the matches: (test)|(long)
Then depending on the language in use you can refer to the matched group using $1 and $2, for example.
I assume (always dangerous) that you want to find whole words, so "test" would match but "testy" would not. Thus the pattern must search for word boundaries, so I use the "\b" word boundary pattern.
/(?i)(\btest\b.*\blong\b|\blong\b.*\btest\b)/
Try this:
/(?i)(?:test.*long|long.*test)/
That will match either test and then long, or long and then test. It will ignore case differences.
Vim has a branch operator \& that allows an even terser regex when searching for a line containing any number of words, in any order.
For example,
/.*test\&.*long
will match a line containing test and long, in any order.
See this answer for more information on usage. I am not aware of any other regex flavor that implements branching; the operator is not even documented on the Regular Expression wikipedia entry.
I don't think that you can do it with a single regex. You'll need to d a logical AND of two - one searching for each word.