The $4 seems not to be necessary,

Indeed, as long as you use

(?:\w+\W+){0,$distance}

instead of the expression I've used,

(\w+\W+){0,$distance}

there will be no extra match. I haven't done any benchmarking, but probably the lookahead is a bit better/faster anyway.

In reply to Re^5: Problems searching and highlighting proximity words in a text by Krambambuli
in thread Problems searching and highlighting proximity words in a text by jrc

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