How can i move words around in a sentence using re

Question

So i have the following sentence: "How quickly daft jumping zebras vex." and i need to come up with a single regex expression that will transform that sentence into this: "vex zebras jumping daft quickly How." Can anyone please help me figure this out?

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comments, regex is not meant for this, since it can't be known how many words there will be. But with your limited example, this works:

^(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+(\w+)\.$

Replace with

$6 $5 $4 $3 $2 $1.

Try it (press [Java]): http://fiddle.re/67kef