Question
How do you define a regular expression that will match each substring that:
- ends a line
- is not preceded by one of a given set of characters
Case
I have a function that removes hardcoded newlines from strings of text, so they will reflow properly. The function works fine, apart from intelligently handling hyphenation.
This is a simplified version of what I have for hyphens.
function (string) { return string.replace(/-\n/g, "") }
It works on things it should work on, no problem. So this...
A hyphen-
ated line.
...becomes...
A hyphenated line.
But it goes too far, and doesn't handle dashes properly, so these examples get garbled:
"""
Mary Rose sat on a pin -
Mary rose.
Mary Rose sat on a pin --
Mary rose.
"""
The function should only consider the -\n
pattern a match if it's not preceded by a hyphen or any kind of whitespace character.