Explaining why the given regex doesn't work properly, it is important to note that the surrounding spaces are being consumed as part of the match. Here's a more simplified explanation:
The regex pattern tries to find a space or start of the string followed by an 'a', and then a space or end of the string.
Breaking down the string with character indexes:
a a a a
0123456
Starting at index 0, we find a match because there is an 'a' followed by a space. Moving to index 2, we don't have a match since 'a' is not preceded by a space or start of string. The same goes for index 6, where 'a' is not preceded by what the regex expects.
The suggested regex /(^|\s+)a(?=\s|$)/g
works differently due to the ?=
quantifier. It checks if the following character meets the condition without actually consuming it as part of the match.