I'm trying to put together a regular expression search that finds any two (or more) words that are within n (e.g., more than 1, less than 5) words of each other. The goal is to search over a prose text, and find unneeded repetitions of words close to each other.
Example: in the following text, the search should identify "package:"
The postman delivered a package, and the package was heavy.
The challenge is that the two words can be any two words, but must be the same two words. I've been trying to figure out a way to work with *
or +
(I'm fairly new to regular expressions), but of course, wildcards would match every word, so they don't work. Is there any search structure like $1 within n of $1
that would translate to regex?