RegEx (.*?) any thing but one character

Question

I'm trying to match something with a pattern amongst the lines of /^(.*?)\/$. However, since (.*?) already matches / it also matches anything/////////// but I only want it to match anything/.

Is there a nice way to exclude / from (.*?) or alternative solutions?

Answer 1

Use a negated character class [^\/]:

/^([^\/]*)\/$/

See the regex demo

In PHP, you may avoid overescaping in the pattern using some other delimiter, say ~:

$rx = '~^([^/]*)/$~';

Details:

• ^ - start of string
• ([^\/]*) - Group 1 capturing 0+ chars other than /
• \/ - a literal /
• $ - end of string.

Note you do not need a lazy quantifier *? with this negated character class since it will be much more efficient with a greedy one, *.