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I have a Matlab project which I'm working on in the OSX editor TextMate. I need to find all instances of a certain word, let's say it's "foo", that is not either preceded by a "." or succeeded by a "/".

However, I cannot find any way to search for regular expressions that are negatively defined like this. Does anyone know if it is possible to search for something like "A preceded by anything other than B"?

(TextMate uses the Oniguruma regular expression library by K. Kosako.)

Nagel
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2 Answers2

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You want to use this bit of the syntax:

(?=subexp)         look-ahead
(?!subexp)         negative look-ahead
(?<=subexp)        look-behind
(?<!subexp)        negative look-behind

In your case, (?<!\.)foo(?!/)

m4573r
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The ^ (circumflex or caret) inside square brackets negates the expression. So to find a "foo" not preceded by a "." would be:

[^.]foo
Brian
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  • that should be `(^|[^.])(foo)` and also it also matched one extra character. – ctrl-alt-delor Sep 20 '12 at 12:25
  • Thanks, Brian! This is the variant I tried initially, but I messed up the syntax and tried ^[\.] instead of [^\.] :P – Nagel Sep 20 '12 at 12:34
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    This won't work. You want all characters except '.' which means 'any character'. You need to escape it: (^|[^\.])(foo) – András Gyömrey May 08 '14 at 18:02
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    [stuf] matches the letters s,t,u,f. Contents of square brackets are NOT an expression, they are a list. [^.] is anything but period. [^\.] is anything that isn't a back slash or a dot. ^ and - are the only characters that sometimes have a special meaning in [] – Sherwood Botsford Jan 21 '20 at 23:56
  • Why not `[^\.]foo`? – s3c Mar 08 '23 at 13:10