Regular expression: match everything except *.TMP

Question

I'm having troubles to create a regular expression who checks if a file has the extention .TMP so the pattern should accept any string who's not equal to (a-z 0-9 or event dots).TMP

To be clear: the matcher should only be succesfull when the file doesn't have the TMP extention.

I've allready found that I need to use (?!expression) for the "not"...

(?!.*TMP]) // is wrong ;-)

Answer 1

"(?<!\\.TMP)\\Z"

Read: something other than ".TMP" followed by the end of the string.

Answer 2

It is not a answer of your question but I think you should look at Apache Common IO which have a bunch of simple methods which can do everything your commonly do. Including finding extensions. Then you simply make a if statement instead of a reg. exp.

http://commons.apache.org/io/

and see the specific java doc for getExtension: getExtension JavaDoc

Answer 3

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1061651/java-regular-expression-match-everything-but

Search before you post something! :)

Answer 4

if (!filename.endsWith(".TMP")) {
     /* then we found a match without using regExp */
}