So, I've been playing with writing several expressions, but nothing satisfactory yet.

To expand a little on what I want, I am I want it to match on a word that ends in single quote, but not if it is enclosed in single quotes or has a letter following it directly. So cases like 'hello' and don't shouldn't match.

What I've got so far is thanks to your examples and some googling is this:

([\w]+)'

This is good in that it will match on any word, however it doesnt take care of the case when the word is enclosed in single quotes or is inside a word like don't.

I've tried inverted character classes like this:

[^']([\w]+)'[^a-zA-Z]

But, that doesn't seem to do what I would expect.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Sam