I'm looking for a regular expression that matches words with 8 or 7 characters and includes (ea). this is what I've got so far:
[\w*(ea)\w*]{7,8}
the problem is it also accepts the first 8 characters of "bbeabbbbbbb" but I dont want that.
when inside charset [], brackets (,) loses its special meaning and matched literally. that's why you are getting wrong results. Try below regex.
(?=(?=(?<!\w)\w*\(ea\))[\w()]{7,8}(?:\s|$))[\w()]{7,8}