正则表达式搜索2个字符串之间的可选通配符

Question

I have seen similar problems but I cant quite get them to work for my scenario.

I am trying to use regex to find an optional wildcard between 2 strings. Here is an example of the strings that the regex does find correctly: not happy

if the string was: not very happy

The code must still match both cases.

The code I have is:

/\b(?<=not(*?).)happy\b/

(happy and very would be variables)

Any help pointing me in the right direction would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

Some tweaking may be required, but this would match up to two words in between "not" and "happy":

/not(?:\s+\w+){0,2}\s+happy/