I would like to explain Alan Moore's answer
A word boundary is a position that is either preceded by a word character and not followed by one or followed by a word character and not preceded by one.
Suppose I have a string "This is a cat, and she's awesome", and I want to replace all occurrences of the letter 'a' only if this letter ('a') exists at the "Boundary of a word",
In other words: the letter a
inside 'cat' should not be replaced.
So I'll perform regex (in Python) as
re.sub(r"\ba","e", myString.strip())
//replace a
with e
Therefore,
Input; Output
This is a cat and she's awesome
This is e cat end she's ewesome