Regex match all except a pattern

Question

I need a little help. I already tried to practice in several ways, but it didn't work as expected. For example, this one.

I want to match all single words except the pattern <br> in JS.

So I tried

(?!<br>)[\s\S]
(?!<|b|r|>)[\s\S]

The problem I have is, in the ?! quote, it's matching either the first word, < only, not the entire pattern <br>. In reverse, just <br> can match all <br> expect any other words. How can I let it know I want to match the entire word in the ?! quote?

Thank you so much!

Here is what I am trying.

@WashingtonGuedes I want a excluding match not replacement...I already know that. — Micah, May 16 '17 at 23:05
Can you please provide a sample string and your expected output. — RobG, May 16 '17 at 23:06
@RobG can you fix my example? https://regex101.com/r/vEVgtM/1/ — Micah, May 16 '17 at 23:07
@WashingtonGuedes Can you help to fix my example? to exclude all
. https://regex101.com/r/vEVgtM/1/ — Micah, May 16 '17 at 23:07
@Till, you are doing it all wrong. Do not try to do everything with 1 regex, it is not that powerful in JS as in PCRE. You cannot skip any match, but in your code, you can. See [this demo](https://jsfiddle.net/z9coueyL/). — Wiktor Stribiżew, May 16 '17 at 23:08
@WiktorStribiżew So you are saying that there is no such excluding match in JS? — Micah, May 16 '17 at 23:10
No way to skip a match with JS regex. But you may match and capture what you need, and just match what you do not need, see [this JS demo](https://jsfiddle.net/z9coueyL/). Is that the required output, `[" ", "a", "a", "a", "a", "b", "r", "<", "p", ">"]`? — Wiktor Stribiżew, May 16 '17 at 23:11
@WiktorStribiżew I think you already gave me what I want. The result its excluding
, I need to spend time to learn how this work. Ty so much. — Micah, May 16 '17 at 23:14
@WiktorStribiżew Oh, sorry, its not...its pushing to an array. — Micah, May 16 '17 at 23:16
@Till: instead of turning mad all the people that read your question, explain what you want to do and what is the final goal of this. You will get better answers. — Casimir et Hippolyte, May 16 '17 at 23:19

Washington Guedes · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-17T00:27:16.700

1

The regular expression you are looking for might look like this:

([^>]|<(?!br>)[^>]+>)+(?=<br>|$)

It should work for any tag, try replacing br by p in the above pattern.

^{Regex101 link}

However, It would be much easier and readable and faster to use:

content.split('<br>').filter(x => x.length)

Hope it helps.

edited May 17 '17 at 00:27

answered May 16 '17 at 23:44

Washington Guedes

4,254
3
30
56

I suggested splitting in the very first comment, but OP did not provide any feedback, and I removed it after some 10th comment. Perhaps, there is something else OP is doing "behind the scenes". – Wiktor Stribiżew May 16 '17 at 23:46

Regex match all except a pattern

1 Answers1