Hello, I am Sean Murphy » word http://iamseanmurphy.com Thoughts, news, code by Sean Murphy Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:37:51 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Negative Word Matching with Regular Expressions http://iamseanmurphy.com/2008/04/28/negative-word-matching-with-regular-expressions/ http://iamseanmurphy.com/2008/04/28/negative-word-matching-with-regular-expressions/#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:42:34 +0000 Sean Murphy http://iamseanmurphy.com/2008/04/28/negative-word-matching-with-regular-expressions/ Today on the #codeigniter IRC channel someone asked about how to match a string that didn’t start with a specific word using a regex. I quickly threw out that, off the top of my head, /^(word){0}/ should work. Well, surprisingly, it didn’t. Turns out negatively matching words with regular expressions is a little more difficult.

After a little research I came up with a working solution: /^(?!word).*/

This post by Jeff Atwood helped: Excluding matches with Regular Expressions

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