I want to code some parsing using regular expressions where I can later go in and change the suite of characters that I want to associate (or not associate) with a word-like entity. In other words, I want to define what characters can be used to make up a word. I coded the lines seen below, and it works pretty well except when my words get separated with more than one of the characters I define to not be ones that make up a word. How can I recode this to treat a run of more than one of these characters to be the same as if there was only a single character separating two words?
<##> $s = 'a:b'<##> $s.split( '[' + '- @.":%&;,=~!`]}<>'+ [Regex]::Escape('\.+|$#[(){?^') + "'" + "`t" + ']+' )
a
b<##> $s = 'a::::b'<##> $s.split( '[' + '- @.":%&;,=~!`]}<>'+ [Regex]::Escape('\.+|$#[(){?^') + "'" + "`t" + ']+' )
a
b