also,

a(\W+\w+){1,6}\W+for

Why not this regex :

a\s+(\w+\s+){1,6}?for

OR

a\h+(\w+\h+){1,6}?for

With the sample text, below, it matches, only, in sentences 2 to 7 !

1 : If was a for sale ( Incorrect sentence ! )
2 : It was a house for sale.
3 : It was a small house for sale.
4 : It was a small old house for sale.
5 : It was a very small old house for sale.
6 : It was a very small old green house for sale.
7 : It was a very small old green wooden house for sale.
8 : It was a very small old green wooden house designed for sale.
9 : It was a very small old green wooden house not designed for sale.

With a single long line of text, joining lines 1 to 9, it works nice too !

If was a for sale ( Incorrect sentence ! ) It was a house for sale. It was a small house for sale. It was a small old house for sale. It wasavery small old house for sale. It was a very small old green house for sale. It was a very small old green wooden house for sale. It was a very small old green wooden house designed for sale. It was a very small old green wooden house not designed for sale.

Best Regards,

guy038

First, may I say, thank you for showing example data and what you had previously tried. That make it so much easier to help you.

I’ve got a solution that I think will work: (?i)\bA\b(?:\s*\b\w+\b\s*){1,6}\bFOR\b See it described at https://regexr.com/3uuht.

In your sequence, the problems I see:

• [\s\S]*? means a non-greedy selection of 0 or more spaces or non-spaces – that means it non-greedy matches anything. I am not sure that’s what you really intended
• \w+{1,6}: one or more word characters (from \w+), followed by nothing repeated 1 to 6 times. This is actually an error in the regex, and probably will cause the regex to do nothing (NPP Find says “invalid regular expression”). If you want the {1,6} to apply to the groupings of one-or-more word characters, you have to parenthesize around the \w+, as shown

I fixed those in my version.

I also added a couple more word boundaries, just to be explicit, and to prevent some false matches that I think may or may not be what you want.

Caveats in my interpretation:

• (?i): I was explicit about case insensitive (otherwise A and FOR would not match a and for)
• I wanted to make it match a day for, but not an evening for, because you said “a”. If you want it to be able to start with a or an, but not and, use \bAN*\b
• Since you said “for”, I assumed you wanted to match a day for, but not a day to go forth nor a day to go forward. If you want the latter as well, then \bFOR\w*\b
• You weren’t explict as to whether you wanted the space after “for” to be included in the match or not (your final [\s\S] kindof hinted you do, but I wasn’t sure). If you do, then \bFOR\b\s+