Strictly speaking, it wasn't specified whether an overlapping good and bad match is good or bad. As it happens alphabetical superstrings are always exceptions, when there is no whitespace breaking them up and I need to add this in - it also illustrates why it's nasty for a regexp:

    #more exceptions to all /MATCH/ strings:
    /\w+MATCH\W+/ or /\W+MATCH\w+/ or /\w+MATCH\w+/ ...
[download]

Er, except that of course it doesn't like \W so anyway I'll have to borrow from some other solutions here which use the local negation operator.

thanks for your input,

the Moron

Free your mind