Negating a set of words via java regex

Question

I would like to negate a set of words using java regex.

Say, I want to negate cvs, svn, nvs, mvc. I wrote a regex which is ^[(svn|cvs|nvs|mvc)].

Some how that seems not to be working.

Answer 1

Try this:

^(?!.*(svn|cvs|nvs|mvc)).*$

this will match text if it doesn't contain one of svn, cvs, nvs or mvc.

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