Negation of regular expression pattern in JavaScript

Question

I have a regular expression pattern: [a-zA-Z0-9]{8}.

Is there some way to negate this pattern? I mean that using that expression I should be able to match all substrings that do not match this pattern.

I tried a negative look behind - (?!(a-zA-Z0-9{8})), but that has never worked in JavaScript.

Do you want to match a string, or do you want to test a string? — CoderPi
– CoderPi, Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 12:29
Yes, that works fine. I will try it in our company framework. I must implement that JSON there, but it may work. Thanks. — Jigsaw1987
– Jigsaw1987, Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 12:31

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-07 12:37:04Z

3

In order to obtain all the substrings that do not match a specific pattern, you can use String#split:

var re = /[a-zA-Z0-9]{8}/;
var s = "09 ,Septemeber";
document.body.innerHTML += JSON.stringify(s.split(re).filter(Boolean));

The idea is that those substrings that match will be delimiters, and will be missing from the obtained array.

I added .filter(Boolean) to get rid of empty array elements that often appear when splitting with a regex.

Note that the pattern should not contain capturing groups, or the captured substrings will be part of the resulting array.

answered Jan 7, 2016 at 12:37

Wiktor Stribiżew

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1 Comment

Wiktor Stribiżew Over a year ago

Actually, the (?!(a-zA-Z0-9{8})) regex pattern does not match any text, only locations (empty strings) that are not followed by a followed by -, followed by z.... and followed by 8 occurrences of the 9 digt.

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