Regex Inverse Matching

Came across a situation today were I need to inverse match on a string. In other words I want to match anything that is not xyz.

Here is how to do it using negative look-ahead:

^((?!xyz).+)$

Alternatively you can use negative look-behind:

^(.+(?<!xyz))$

This entry was written by Marco Magdy, posted on January 9, 2009 at 5:36 PM, filed under Regular Expressions. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

2 Comments

  1. shivang
    Posted July 24, 2009 at 7:24 AM | Permalink

    Hi Marco,

    Thanks for this very easy and off course effective regex.

    Regards,
    shivang

    Reply
  2. Paul
    Posted July 24, 2009 at 10:38 AM | Permalink

    Fantastic, thanks for this!

    Reply

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