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Re: lookahead, lookbehind, ... I'm lost

by Roy Johnson (Monsignor)
on May 06, 2009 at 18:13 UTC ( [id://762349]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to lookahead, lookbehind, ... I'm lost

If you don't mind my whoring my own tutorial (you may have read it), the idiom you're looking for is:

Matching a pattern that doesn't include another pattern

You might want to capture everything between foo and bar that doesn't include baz. The technique is to have the regex engine look-ahead at every character to ensure that it isn't the beginning of the undesired pattern:
/foo # Match starting at foo ( # Capture (?: # Complex expression: (?!baz) # make sure we're not at the beginning of baz . # accept any character )* # any number of times ) # End capture bar # and ending at bar /x;
Note that you have to have the lookahead checked for every character you're accepting. In your case, the [^\n]+ sub-pattern needs to be adjusted to make sure every character is not the beginning of a Lib:
(?: # Complex expression: (?!Lib) # make sure we're not at the beginning of Lib [^\n] # accept any character )+ # any positive number of times

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: lookahead, lookbehind, ... I'm lost
by ExReg (Priest) on May 07, 2009 at 16:42 UTC
    Great tutorial! Thanks!

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