Java Regex include all letters of the alphabet except certain letters

Question

What I need to do is to determine whether a word consists of letters except certain letters. For example I need to test whether a word consists of the letters from the English alphabet except letters: I, V and X.

Currently I have this long regex for the simple task above:

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("[ABCDEFGHJKLMNOPQRSTUWYZ]+");

Any of you know any shorthand way of excluding certain letters from a Java regex? Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the && operator to create a compound character class using subtraction:

String regex = "[A-Z&&[^IVX]]+";