Regex - Match any word but ignore specific word

Question

I want to match any word that starts/ends or not contain with word "end" but ignore word "end", for example:

hello - would match
boyfriend - would match
endless - would match
endend - would match

but

end - would NOT match

I'm using ^(?!end)).*$ but its not what I want.

Sorry for my english

Wait. You just want to exclude the word 'end' itself? All the rest should match? — Robby Cornelissen, Jul 27 '17 at 05:18

NID · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-27T05:30:48.717

11

Try this:

^(?!(end)$).+$

This will match everything except end.

edited Jul 27 '17 at 05:30

answered Jul 27 '17 at 05:25

NID

2,835
1
15
25

3

Just a modification. You should use `.+` instead of `.*`. Because `.*` will match zero width. – Rahul Jul 27 '17 at 05:28
1

@Rahul good point.. thanks for notifying – NID Jul 27 '17 at 05:30
1

@downvoter a reason would be nice. – NID Jul 27 '17 at 05:37
Huge ! And if you want 2 word excluded ==> ^(?!(word1|word2)$).+$ – Deunz Dec 10 '19 at 13:14

Antoine C. · Answer 2 · 2017-07-27T06:02:33.380

So you want to match any word, but not "end" ?

Unless I'm misunderstanding, a conditional statement is everything that is needed... In pseudocode:

if (word != "end") {
    // Match
}

If you want to match all the words in a text that are not "end" you could just remove all the non-alpha characters, replace pattern (^end | end | end$) by an empty string, and then do a string split. The other answers with a single regex might be better then, because regex matches are O(n), no matter of the pattern.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 27 '17 at 05:48

You can use this \b(?!(?:end\b))[\w]+

Components: \b -> Start of the word boundary for each words. (?! Negative lookahead to eliminate the word end. (?:end\b) Non capturing parenthesis with the word end and word boundary. ) Closing tag for negative lookahead. [\w]+ character class to capture words.

Explanation: The regex search will only look for locations starting with word boundaries, and will remove matches with end as only word. i.e [WORD BOUNDARY]end[END OF WORD BOUNDARY]. \w will capture rest of the word. You can keep incrementing this character class if you wish to capture some special characters like $ etc.

Regex - Match any word but ignore specific word

3 Answers3