VBA Excel regex - \b word boundary doesn't match if word is at beginning of string [closed]

Answer 1

I'm not sure why this doesn't work in VBA. In any regex implementation I've seen \b matches word boundary also at the beginning of the string.

Maybe you can try something like this: (?:^|\b)abc

Answer 2

VBA Regex seems to work appropriately only on non-Unicode text. If you use non-Latin Unicode symbols in your text, \b combination is not a good choise.

As a workaround you could just use (?:[^a-zA-Z0-9à-ÿÀ-Ÿ]|^|$) to catch word bound. Here you can see à-ÿÀ-Ÿ that is a interval of Non-Latin symbols in your text.

Answer 3

Can you use alternation?

(?:\b|^)abc

UPDATE:

In Excel 2010 at least, \b works as expected.

Sub test()
    Set re = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp")
    re.Pattern = "\babc"
    MsgBox re.test("abc")
    re.Pattern = "^abc"
    MsgBox re.test("abc")
    re.Pattern = "(?:\b|^)abc"
    MsgBox re.test("abc")
End Sub

The above outputs True, True, True for me.