regex how to: if something is at beginning of the line the match is on then don't match

Question

I actually want to skip matches on lines that begin with "..." in this case. I already have: [^0]\\swarnings?(?!\\.|\\w) so I need to keep that functionality and add the don't match warning on lines starting with "..." Thanks! edit: I'm using javascript.

Answer 1

Try

^(?!\.+).+$

or, if you need to match 3 dots exactly,

^(?!\.{3}).+$

Edited to show case with OP's current regex:

^(?!\.{3})[^0]\\swarnings?(?!\\.|\\w)$

Answer 2

If you use a language supporting infinitely sized lookbehinds (like .NET), you can use

(?<!^\.\.\..*)yourterm

If you cannot use this, but know that there may be only one match of your expression per line, you could find those by using

^(?!\.\.\.).*(yourterm)

This will actually match the whole start of the line, but have the term you are interested in in a capturing group.

If you can have multiple matches per line, you can not easily achieve this with only one regex, I think.

In any case, it might be easier to use ^(?!\.\.\.).* to first get rid of all lines starting with ... and start another run on these to obtain your matches.