Check if there’s a whitespace (\s
) before or if it’s the start of the string (^
).
(?:\s|^)@.*
If you only want to match word characters, then instead of using .
you could use \w
. Also note that *
would still match just "@"
, so you might want to use +
instead to match at least one character.
(?:\s|^)@\w+
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solved How to Delete Strings that Start with Certain Characters in Ruby