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@puppy@sleeping.town it's because regex was designed by programmers, where the notion of "a word" is a bit less useful
(although as a linguist I could easily go on a rant about how the idea of "a word" is actually.... really complex and weird)
@lizardsquid @puppy Unless your application is used exclusively by programmers, regular expressions have absolutely no business getting anywhere near your end users. Mastodon needs a sane muted words list.
@lizardsquid @puppy I'm a programmer who frequently works with regular expressions. And I've got to say... they're even worse than that.
Spaces aren't always enough. It won't match if it's at the end of a sentence (a . isn't a space) or the start of a line (nothing before it). Of course, there are ways depending on which regex dialect...
Ah. Yes. There are also something like half a dozen similar but slightly incompatible standards for writing them, and they all do word boundaries differently.