Can one negate spaces before a character in a Regex search?

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#1

Hi, I am trying to look for all occurrences where « for example is not preceded by a space in order to insert one.
I tried (?!\s)(«) but it finds all « regardless whether they are preceded by a space or not.
Does anybody have any clues?

#2

I tried (?!\s)(«) but it finds all « regardless whether they are preceded by a space or not.

(?!\s) is a negative look-ahead assertion (see documentation), and what you want is negative look-behind assertion: (?<!\s).

#3

Thanks a lot Mike, also for the documentation.

#4

I just found it: ([^\s])(«)

#5

Likely this is what you actually need, because I guess that you need to match only cases where the quote is immediately preceded by a character, while use of (simple) negative look-behind assertion would also match cases where the quote is the first in the paragraph.

#6

Thank you, this behavior of the look-ahead and look-behind could help me with another issue I have actually. But I’ll open another issue for that.

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