Regex Until But Not Including

Question

For regex what is the syntax for search until but not including? Kinda like:

Haystack:
The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog

Expression:
.*?quick -> and then everything until it hits the letter "z" but do not include z

Answer 1

In essence, the regex way of saying "search until X but not including X" is:

(?:(?!X).)*

where X can be any regular expression.

In your case, though, this might be overkill - here the easiest way would be

[^z]*

This will match anything except z and therefore stop right before the next z.

So .*?quick[^z]* will match The quick fox jumps over the la.

However, as soon as you have more than one simple letter to look out for, (?:(?!X).)* comes into play, for example

(?:(?!lazy).)* - match anything until the start of the word lazy.

This is using a lookahead assertion, more specifically a negative lookahead.

.*?quick(?:(?!lazy).)* will match The quick fox jumps over the.

Explanation:

(?:        # Match the following any number of times:
 (?!lazy)  # (first assert that it's not possible to match "lazy" here
 .         # then match any character
)*         # end of group, zero or more repetitions.

Furthermore, when searching for keywords, you might want to surround them with word boundary anchors: \bfox\b will only match the complete word fox but not the fox in foxy.

Answer 2

Try this

(.*?quick.*?)z