CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
Jigsaw1987
Jigsaw1987

Reputation: 11

Negation of regular expression pattern in JavaScript

I have a regular expression pattern: [a-zA-Z0-9]{8}.

Is there some way to negate this pattern? I mean that using that expression I should be able to match all substrings that do not match this pattern.

I tried a negative look behind - (?!(a-zA-Z0-9{8})), but that has never worked in JavaScript.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 98

Answers (1)

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 626802

In order to obtain all the substrings that do not match a specific pattern, you can use String#split:

var re = /[a-zA-Z0-9]{8}/;
var s = "09 ,Septemeber";
document.body.innerHTML += JSON.stringify(s.split(re).filter(Boolean));

The idea is that those substrings that match will be delimiters, and will be missing from the obtained array.

I added .filter(Boolean) to get rid of empty array elements that often appear when splitting with a regex.

Note that the pattern should not contain capturing groups, or the captured substrings will be part of the resulting array.

Upvotes: 3

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