Can i exclude a word in my pattern?

Question

I know i can do something like ab[^c]+def which should match ab_blah_hi_blah_def but is there a way to do something like

ab(^hi)+def

which will exclude the word hi causeing ab_blah_hi_blah_def to fail? but not ab_blah_h_i_blah_def

Answer 1

You can use a negative lookahead to do something like this. The pattern (?!foobar). matches every character, except the f in "foobar".

So to match every word but "hi", you could use ^((?!hi)\w)+$.