Check it again: your first idea doesnt work either for d'aujourd'hui (but does for aujourd'hui, unless I am myself doing some typos ;-)

The problem there is that your regexp is not.. what should I say.. "recursive": /^(\w+')([\w-]+)$) can only return two matches (i.e.: $1 and $2 and not $1, $2, $3 to $n, etc)