xslt - Regex anchors inside character class

Question

Is it possible to use anchors inside a character class? This doesn't work:

analyze-string('abcd', '[s^]abcd[s$]') 

It looks like ^ and $ are treated as literal when inside a character class; however, escaping them (^, $) doesn't work either.

I'm trying to use this expression to create word boundaries ( is not available in XSLT/XQuery), but I would prefer not to use groups ((^|s)) -- since non-capturing groups aren't available, that means in some scenarios I may end up with a large amount of unneeded capture groups, and that creates a new task of finding the "real" capture groups in the set of unneeded ones.

Answer 1

I believe the answer is no, you can't include ^ and $ as anchors in a [], only as literal characters. (I've wished you could do that before too.)

However, you could concat a space on the front and back of the string, then just look for s as word boundaries and never mind the anchors. E.g.

analyze-string(concat(' ', 'abcd xyz abcd', ' '), 'sabcds')

You may also want + after each s, but that's a separate issue.