Regex not operator

java regex string
Sonnenhut picture Sonnenhut · Sep 6, 2011 · Viewed 356.3k times · Source

Is there an NOT operator in Regexes? Like in that string : "(2001) (asdf) (dasd1123_asd 21.01.2011 zqge)(dzqge) name (20019)"

I want to delete all \([0-9a-zA-z _\.\-:]*\) but not the one where it is a year: (2001).

So what the regex should return must be: (2001) name.

NOTE: something like \((?![\d]){4}[0-9a-zA-z _\.\-:]*\) does not work for me (the (20019) somehow also matches...)

Answer

Johan Sjöberg picture Johan Sjöberg · Sep 6, 2011

Not quite, although generally you can usually use some workaround on one of the forms

  • [^abc], which is character by character not a or b or c,
  • or negative lookahead: a(?!b), which is a not followed by b
  • or negative lookbehind: (?<!a)b, which is b not preceeded by a

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