How to Use Regular Expression to Look for the something NOT of Certain pattern

Question

Using Perl style regexp, is it possible to look for something not of certain pattern?

For example, [^abc] looks for a SINGLE CHARACTER not a nor b nor c.

But can I specify something longer than a single character?
For example, in the following string, I want to search for the first word which is not a top level domain name and contains no uppercase letter, or perhaps some more complicated rules like having 3-10 characters. In my example, this should be "abcd":

net com org edu ABCE abcdefghijklmnoparacbasd abcd

Answer 1

You can do it using negative look-ahead assertions as:

^(?!(?:net|com|org|edu)$)(?!.*[A-Z])[a-z]{3,10}$

See it

Explanation:

^                   - Start anchor
$                   - End anchor
(?:net|com|org|edu) - Alternation, matches net or com or org or edu
(?!regex)           - Negative lookahead. 
                      Matches only if the string does not match the regex.

So the part (?!(?:net|com|org|edu)$) ensures that input is not one of the top level domains.

The part (?!.*[A-Z]) ensures that the input does not have a upper case letter.

The part [a-z]{3,10}$ ensures that the input is of length atleast 3 and atmost 10.

Answer 2

Just use the "not match" operator: !~

So just create your expression and then see that a variable does not match it:

if ($var !~ /abc/) {
  ...
}