I am a big fan of regular expressions.  They are so mysterious and elegant, I love them and hate them, cherish them and despise them.  In other words they are both beautiful and nasty, but they can really get the job done.  I was intrigued today when a colleague of mine was asking how to match a string but if it started with a specific sequence then do not match.  In my regex coolness I said “Sure, that’s easy man!”, whipped out QuickREx in Eclipse, wrote down a quick jolt of brilliance and BAMM!! I hit the brick wall at 90! Nothing I was trying would work, characters where matched not the word:

   1: ^([^search].*)dev\.domain

Basically match any incoming domain that ends with dev.domain but it should not be preceded by the word search.  I really thought I nailed it with that regex, but NOOO, it matches character classes not full words.  So I had to revert my humble ego and go back to the books and voila: Positive and Negative LookAhead!

Granted, some regex engines do not support look behinds, but thankfully java does.  Here is a cool definition:

(?!regex)


Zero-width negative lookahead. Identical to positive lookahead, except that the overall match will only succeed if the regex inside the lookahead fails to match.

And finally and AHA!! moment.  I can use the lookahead:

   1: ^(?!search|training).*dev\.domain

AND BUYAAA!!!  I think this can help somebody out there. It helped me!