Answer by Sean for What is a word boundary in regex?

I believe that your problem is due to the fact that - is not a word character. Thus, the word boundary will match after the -, and so will not capture it. Word boundaries match before the first and after the last word characters in a string, as well as any place where before it is a word character or non-word character, and after it is the opposite. Also note that word boundary is a zero-width match.

One possible alternative is

(?:(?:^|\s)-?)\d+\b

This will match any numbers starting with a space character and an optional dash, and ending at a word boundary. It will also match a number starting at the beginning of the string.