Using negative lookahead/lookbehind with \w for word boundaries seems like an improvement over \b since, unlike \b, it always checks that the preceding character is not a word character instead of determining the behaviour based on the first/last character of the word.

For example, the current implementation (as seen in stable releases) for a word such as <h> has:

• false positives: "x<h>y"
• false negatives: " <h> "

This PR handles both of these correctly.

With that said, this case is also handled fine by a simpler:

rf"(?<!\w){re.escape(w)}(?!\w)"

I don't think we should really be deciding whether a word boundary should be checked based on whether the first/last character is a word character. Do you have some concrete cases where this would actually be an improvement rather than just make things possibly more confusing?