regex using Sublime

Question

Using my text editor of choice, Sublime 2, I want to search through code that has uncommented alerts. So I need a regex for that finds "alert" but not "//alert" or "// alert". I don't know how to invert and then combine the two results. Sublime Text uses the Boost syntax for regular expressions. Thank you for any help.

Answer 1

You can search for text not preceeded by //, thus

(?<!\/\/\s?)alert

EDIT: If the editor doesn't support variable lookbehinds you must specify all the possibilities in different lookbehinds

(?<!\/\/\s)(?<!\/\/)alert

Answer 2

try this:

(?<!//)(?<!// )alert

Boost syntax is based on Pearl RegExp. Thus negative lookbehind (?<!text) should be supported. In this example I use the negative lookbehind twice (with and without space) because the lookbehind text has to be fixed length.

you can read more about lookaraound feature in RegExp here:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html