title: Regular expression to parse through novel text
body: <p>I'm trying to read from a file that contains the text of a novel. I'd like to read each successive word, but of course the fact that there is punctuation in the novel makes that difficult.</p>
  
  <p>I need to read just words in the novel, so ignore characters like "," "!" and "?", but I need to include certain non-alphabet characters such as the apostrophe that are actually part of words.</p>
  
  <p>I'm not great with regular expressions, but my feeling is that this regex only grabs characters, but doesn't account for apostrophes:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[^A-Za-z]+
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Can anyone help me get a regex that will delimit by words, ignoring punctuation, yet keeping apostrophes and other characters that form parts of words?</p>