Hayley

Hayley said:

I'd like to set up a Regex QA check to flag up target segments where I've forgotten to use the preposition "on" after the verb "click".

If this isn't translated then check to see if the source finds this:

(?i)click[^\s]*\son

Then check to see if the target finds the same thing.

Hayley

Hayley said:

I'd like to set up a Regex QA check to flag up target segments where I've forgotten to use the preposition "on" after the verb "click".

If this isn't translated then check to see if the source finds this:

(?i)click[^\s]*\son

Then check to see if the target finds the same thing.

Would you say in English "click on something"? This is new to me, as I always understood it should be "click something". Click the button, not "Clickon the button". This has nothing to do with the regex in question here, is just my pure curiosity to learn English better. So forgive for kidnapping your topic, but it is always good to learn something... Thanks

You can say both. Naturally I would say/write "Click something" too, hence the interest in flagging up segments for this particular client who insists on the preposition! But as I said to Paul, I was partly just playing around with RegEx to try and understand more about how it works.

@Hayley: thank you for your kind answer. It is really important to me as a non-native English speaker with English as not working language. It helps greatly to improve.

Rather than using the more complex [^\s], which can be written as \S (i.e. not a whitespace), it would be less confusing to write \w*

click\w*\son
The QA Checker - Regular Expressions provides an "Ignore Case" checkbox.

Hi Anthony,

Doesn't your version find the opposite, i.e. "click/s/ed/ing on"? I wanted to find occurrences of "click" that are NOT followed by "on".
Thanks for the tip about the Ignore Case checkbox though (although I'm glad to have learned the RegEx solution too).

Hayley

Here a solution which finds "click", "clicks", "clicked" or "clicking" when they are not followed by "on":
click(s|ed|ing)?\b(?! on)

It uses a word boundary "\b" and a negative lookahead "(?! on).

You are of course correct, I commented on the regex rather than looking at the original question. 

Thanks for this version Raphaël Toussaint!

Rather than specifying explicit suffixes in Raphaël’s solution (such as “s|ed|ing”), using the generic \w* metacharacter with quantifier click\w*(?!\son) can simplify the regex when many variants need to be coded, but results in an interesting phenomenon in conjunction with negative lookahead; backtracking can cause “false matches”, such as “clicking on”. This problem can be avoided with an atomic group, which is probably the least understood regex construct because almost all regex textbooks provide a very poor description with abstruse examples; an atomic group (?>…) prevents backtracking. The correct regex is click(>\w*)(?!\son)

To prevent false positives, such as “click one button”, it may be better to code (?!\son\b)

Anthony Rudd Thanks for the atomic group explanation - very useful for something I am currently working on.