PHP Regular Expression To Match Any URL Except Those From Example.com

Question

Provide an example for the pseudo-regex: Match every url except those from example.com and example2.com according to the PHP regexp syntax.

Here is what I have so far, but it doesn't work:

$patternToMatch = "@https?://[^(example.com|example2.com)]\"*@i";

Answer 1

Don't use regular expressions for things you don't need to.

$parts = parse_url($url);
if ($parts && $parts['host'] != 'example.com' && $parts['host'] != 'example2.com') {
    // the URL seems OK
}

Answer 2

The problem here is that within a class definition ([]) special characters such as ( and | lose their meaning.

A better solution is to match on example.com or example2.com and then proceed only for negative tests.

Answer 3

No, everything between square brackets will match just one character. For example the regex:

[^example]

will match any single character other than e, x, a, m, p, l and e.

Try negative lookahead:

@https?://(www\.)?(?!example2?.com)@i

Answer 4

Hi, You almost had the answer. This will do the matching that you want.

$patternToMatch = "@https?://(example.com|example2.com)@i";