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Is it possible to define a regex which will match every character except a certain defined character or set of characters?
Basically, I wanted to split a string by either comma (,) or semi-colon (;). So I was thinking of doing it with a regex which would match everything until it encountered a comma or a semi-colon.
321
To match any character except a list of excluded characters, put the excluded charaters between [^ and ] . The caret ^ must immediately follow the [ or else it stands for just itself. The character '. ' (period) is a metacharacter (it sometimes has a special meaning).
Matching a Single Character Using Regex By default, the '. ' dot character in a regular expression matches a single character without regard to what character it is. The matched character can be an alphabet, a number or, any special character.
The 0-9 indicates characters 0 through 9, the comma , indicates comma, and the semicolon indicates a ; . The closing ] indicates the end of the character set. The plus + indicates that one or more of the "previous item" must be present.
Semicolon is not in RegEx standard escape characters. It can be used normally in regular expressions, but it has a different function in HES so it cannot be used in expressions. As a workaround, use the regular expression standard of ASCII.
[^,;]+
You haven't specified the regex implementation you are using. Most of them have a Split method that takes delimiters and split by them. You might want to use that one with a "normal" (without ^) character class:
[,;]+
Use character classes. A character class beginning with caret will match anything not in the class.
[^,;]
use a negative character class:
[^,;]+
Use this:
([^,;]*[,;])*
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