Regex: Find the letter (diacritics/Accent Marks) "î" in the middle of the words, but not the letter î at the beginning or at the end of the words

Question

I must find the letter (diacritics/Accent Marks) î in the middle of the words, but not the letter î at the beginning or at the end of the words.

For example:

1.stăpînii

2.înstăpanit

3.coborî

4.înfornît

So the regex must find the letter î just from words like the first one: stăpînii.

The 2 and 3 word have the letter î at the beginnind or at the end. So those must be ignore from finding.

The 4 case is tricky. It starts with î and also has an î in the middle. So, only the second î must be find by regex.

FINAL: Regex must find the letter îfrom the first word stăpînii and also must find the second î from the last word înfornît

Answer 1

You want to work with lookahead and lookbehind here:

(?<=\w)î(?=\w)

Explanation:

(?<=\w)î(?=\w)  
(?<=  )         #positive lookbehind, "must be preceeding the match"
    \w     \w   #match any word character
       î        #character to match
        (?=  )  #positive lookahed, "must be following the match"

Example

Answer 2

Much more efficient than lookaround, use non word-boundary, it reduces the step number by 2.

• Ctrl+F
• Find what: \Bî\B
• CHECK Wrap around
• CHECK Regular expression
• Find All in Current Document

Explanation:

\B          # NON word-boundary, make sure we have a word character before
î           # letter î
\B          # NON word-boundary, make sure we have a word character after

Screenshot:

Answer 3

For Notepad++, use (?<!\<)î(?!\>)

• (?<!...) - negative lookbehind (i.e: preceeding text doesn't match)
  • \< - start of word boundary (regex extension)
• (?!...) - negative lookahead (i.e: following text doesn't match)
  • \> - end of word boundary (regex extension)