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This should be straightforward. I need a regular expression that selects everything that does not specifically contain a certain word.

So if I have this sentence: "There is a word in the middle of this sentence." And the regular expression gets everything but "middle", I should select everything in that sentence but "middle".

Is there any easy way to do this?

Thanks.

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  • eh, just copy the data to a string var and do a search/replace....probably cheaper than RE anyway. Commented Dec 2, 2010 at 18:36
  • Can this word occur more than once in the sentence? Commented Dec 2, 2010 at 19:50

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It is not possible for a single regex match operation to be discontinuous.

You could use two capturing groups:

(.*)middle(.*)

Then concatenate the contents of capturing groups 1 and 2 after the match.

You may wish to enable the "dot also matches newline" option in your parser.
See for example Java's DOTALL, .NET's Singleline, Perl's s, etc.

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2 Comments

When/if you do this make sure you enable the . to match newline characters as well.
That does not guarantee that neither capture group contains "middle". Should it?
1

Positive lookaround is the way to go:

/^(.+)(?=middle)/ -- gets everything before middle, not including middle

and

/(?!middle)(.+)$/ -- gets everything after middle, not including middle

Then you just merge the results of both

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When/if you do this make sure you enable the . to match newline characters as well.

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