Help with regex to match any url but that of admin folder

Question

I am stuck with something I know must be simple but been going round in circles for a while now.

I want to create a regular expression for use with a cms routing feature using php and preg_match that matches any URL that doesn't begin with the string 'admin/' as somedomain.com/admin/ will be the admin part of the cms.

I have tried so far

preg_match('#^([^admin])+(.+)$#', 'mens-books'))

which fails as the url string 'mens-books' I am looking for is a match against the letter m in the string 'admin' so it fails.

I have tried doing it like this also:

preg_match('#^([^admin$])+(.+)$#', 'mens-books'))

as a dollar symbolises the end of string but that didn't work either.

I then did this:

preg_match('#^[?!=admin]+(.+)$#', 'mens-books'))

which returned true but only I think because the ?!= in the regex now will match anything that is beginning with a, d, m, i or n.

Is anyone able to help with this please. I am open to any suggestions.

Thankyou.

Matt

Answer 1

if (substr($url, 0, 6) !== 'admin/')
{
  echo 'Yippie';
}

But to answer the regex question. When you use square brackets, you're specifying a character class. That means [admin] matches a single character that is either an a, a d an m an i or an n. If you skip the brackets, you're matching a literal string. But, as my code proofs, it is not needed to use regex at all if you need to check if a string starts with a fixed substring.