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copied!<p>Depending upon how transparent you want it to be to users (or what your eventual goal is), you may consider requiring someone to put a symbol (such as <code>@</code>) before a user name, so that they can elect whether or not to have a link to the user...</p> <p>Aside from that, your expression has several potential errors: character classes (denoted by <code>[]</code>) treat nearly all characters literally, including <code>|</code>, the entire alternation syntax makes the third alternation (<code>(\s(user))</code>) into something that will allow matches to <code>userSmith</code> or <code>userJones</code> and not just <code>user</code> - which is something I think you specifically want to disallow...</p> <p>I think you are asking for something like this:</p> <pre><code>(^|\s)(user)(?=[:;,\s]|$) </code></pre> <p>this breaks down to:</p> <pre><code>(^|\s) # either assert that this is the beginning, or capture a whitespace character; capture into back-reference #1 (user) # capture the username 'user' exactly (?= # look-ahead to verify that the following CAN be matched [:;,\s] # one character that is : ; , <or whitespace> | # -OR- $ # the end of the string ) # end look-ahead </code></pre> <p>However, there are a few cases that you might want to consider. By not allowing several types of punctuation after the username, you will exclude results from strings like: <code>Let me know if you see user.</code>, <code>have you seen user?</code> or <code>I really like user!</code> - the rejection for URLs should already be accomplished by requiring whitespace (or the beginning of the string) before <code>user</code> - not allowing such punctuation afterwards will reject some cases I think you will want to match. You could simply add in this extra punctuation:</p> <pre><code>(^|\s)(user\b)(?=[;:,.?!)"\s]|$) </code></pre> <p>But I would suggest something more like the following (removing the following-punctuation requirement):</p> <pre><code>(^|\s)(user\b) </code></pre> <p>I've put all three suggestions on <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/dWVWz/1/">jsFiddle</a>, to show you what you get and allow you to put some of your own strings in.</p> <p>Which ever way you prefer, these expressions would be used in a find-replace wherein you would replace the whitespace consumed before the user's name with itself in the replace expression:</p> <pre><code>source.replace(/(^|\s)(user\b)/gi, '$1<a href="/linkToProfile?n=$2">$2</a>') </code></pre> <p>Though I'm pretty sure I answered the question, please let me know if there are cases you specified that aren't covered!</p>

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