How can I treat special characters as part of a whole word in a regex search?

If I want to do a “whole word” search for a string with special characters, like say “A+”, how can I write a Javascript regex that will match the whole word for cases like the following:

1. Is the only text in the string: “A+”

2. Is at the end of the string: “You got an A+.”

3. Is at the beginning of the string: “A+ good job!”

4. Is in the middle: “You did A+ work here.”

It should return false for:

1. Not whole word: “A++”

2. Not whole word”: “You got an A++!”

… and many other cases

I’d love to just use b:

 /b(A+)b/g 

…but that seems to interact poorly with special characters (in fact I’m not sure that regex can even match anything…).