I am VERY new the regular expressions as it isn't really supported by my programming platform. However, a third-party plug-in I am using does support regular expressions. I am trying to create a regular expression to match on a specific pattern followed by any character except a space and then more characters. I have used "=Case.*" to match on "Case" with any characters after "Case". That works great. I can't seem to find the correct syntax for matching "Case" with any characters after "Case" except a space character.

For instance, I want to match "Case:" or "Case-", but not "Case ".

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

well the Not character is usually ^ so
Case[^ ]
should work for you

Thanks pgtips. So, if I wanted to match "Case: xxyy" and not "Case xxyy", where xxyy is any characters, would the syntax be, "Case[^ ].*"?

Thanks pgtips!

So, if I wanted to match "Case: xxyy" or "Case- xxyy" but not "Case xxyy", where xxyy is any characters, would the syntax be "Case[^ ].*"?

Sorry about the double post, I got an error when I tried to post the first one so I posted again.

Anyway, I answered my own question. pgtips you saved the day. THANK YOU!!!!

How to select cities containing non-matching pattern using ^ operand.

For example:
London
NewYork
Delhi
Mountainview

how to get cities except "Delhi"
Please suggest. Thanks.

Hi neuron,

In theory this is possible with regex, but programmatorically this doesn't make sense. If you are processing the string in software, just parse it to an array for example, and then when processing them all, do something special if it is 'Dehli'. Anyway, just for the theory, it can be done like this:
(Assuming that all your cities are in a file, separated with a newline and that you do a multiline match)

^(?!Delhi$)\w+$

I tried for a minute to do it with negated character classes as you request it, but it is quite hard, and since it doesn't make any sense I'm not gonna waste more time on it...

greetz

Thanks, you understood my requirement but is it practically possible to to simply negate a particular string/group of characters.
I can add ^ in [] like [^Delhi] but it means characters except D,e,l,h,i but not the word except "Delhi"

Dear neuron,

(?!Delhi$) is a lookahead which will match a position (as opposed to a character, it will not consume anything, or change the matching position after it is checked. eg it matches a place between two characters) which is not followed by the word 'Dehli' and the end of the line. So basically this negates this particular group of characters in this order. The end of the line is important to assure that you don't match a cityname that starts with 'Dehli', quite unlikely in this case, but just to be correct.

For more on lookaheads and behinds see: http://be2.php.net/manual/nl/referen...ern.syntax.php and scroll down to assertions. The whole article is quite bulky, but is well worth your time. Once you understand it, i can garantee you that regex are great fun to play with.... have fun

Thanks ufo, really nice document :)