Match anything.c but not anything.in.c

Question

I'm trying to write a regex that matches a.c, hello.c, etc.c, but not a.in.c, hello.in.c, etc.in.c.

Here's my regex: https://regex101.com/r/jC8nB0/21

It says that the negative lookahead won't match what I specified, that is, .in.c. I didn't know where to teach it to match .c. I tried both inside the parenthesis and outside.

I've read Regex: match everything but specific pattern but it talks about matching everything except something, but I need to match a rule except other rule.

`^[^.]+(?!\.in)\.c` sort of works. – Zereges May 11 '18 at 00:51 — Zereges, May 11 '18 at 00:51

Sherpa · Answer 1 · 2018-05-11T01:12:39.360

3

This worked for me.

.*(?<!(\.in))\.c

https://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html

*Edited do to good information from zzxyz

edited May 11 '18 at 01:12

answered May 11 '18 at 00:59

Sherpa

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this works well if your string is definitely a single filename and just a filename. Probably good for the op. Although it should probably be `\.in` to avoid `writein.c` from being filtered out. – zzxyz May 11 '18 at 01:07

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 11 '18 at 01:29

0

This is actually a bit complicated given unknown input. The following isn't perfect, but it avoids .cpp files, and deals with strings that don't contain filenames, or longer strings that do.

\b\S+(?<!\.in)\.c\b

https://regex101.com/r/jC8nB0/286

answered May 11 '18 at 01:29

zzxyz

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Match anything.c but not anything.in.c

2 Answers2