Which regular expression operator means 'Don't' match this character?

Question

*, ?, + characters all mean match this character. Which character means 'don't' match this? Examples would help.

Answer 1

You can use negated character classes to exclude certain characters: for example [^abcde] will match anything but a,b,c,d,e characters.

Instead of specifying all the characters literally, you can use shorthands inside character classes: [\w] (lowercase) will match any "word character" (letter, numbers and underscore), [\W] (uppercase) will match anything but word characters; similarly, [\d] will match the 0-9 digits while [\D] matches anything but the 0-9 digits, and so on.

If you use PHP you can take a look at the regex character classes documentation.

Answer 2

There's two ways to say "don't match": character ranges, and zero-width negative lookahead/lookbehind.

The former: don't match a, b, c or 0: [^a-c0]

The latter: match any three-letter string except foo and bar:

(?!foo|bar).{3}

or

.{3}(?<!foo|bar)

Also, a correction for you: *, ? and + do not actually match anything. They are repetition operators, and always follow a matching operator. Thus, a+ means match one or more of a, [a-c0]+ means match one or more of a, b, c or 0, while [^a-c0]+ would match one or more of anything that wasn't a, b, c or 0.