Word boundary assertion: \b, \B

\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 u and i flags are both 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 ");

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

• Assertions
• Regular expressions reference
• Input boundary assertion: ^, $
• Lookahead assertion: (?=...), (?!...)
• Lookbehind assertion: (?<=...), (?<!...)
• Character escape: \n, \u{...}