CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
arik
arik

Reputation: 29250

Regular expression: find range except for one letter or a range

How can I use the negation within square brackets as an exception, to find e. g. everything between a-z except for the the range from m-o? [a-z^m-o]?

By the way: it's not for the sake of this example that I ask, but to be able to exclude ranges within ranges, or even single letters within ranges. I am pretty much aware that in this example it can be calculated.

I use the Zend engine (PHP).

Upvotes: 12

Views: 15128

Answers (2)

ig0774
ig0774

Reputation: 41247

In addition to what Kenny mentions:

  1. The JDK (at least) supports this syntax:

    [a-z&&[^m-o]]

  2. A couple of engines (including the .NET framework) support this:

    [a-z-[m-o]]

Upvotes: 19

kennytm
kennytm

Reputation: 523214

You should be able calculate the difference yourself.

[a-lp-z]

If the regex engine supports lookahead assertion, you could use

(?![m-o])[a-z]

but this would probably be less efficient.

Upvotes: 29

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