CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
Jack Shcherbakov
Jack Shcherbakov

Reputation: 59

Is it possible to negate a group in a regular expression?

Let's say that we have this text:

2020-09-29
2020-09-30
2020-10-01
2020-10-02
2020-10-12
2020-10-16
2020-11-12
2020-11-23
2020-11-15
2020-12-01
2020-12-11
2020-12-30

I want to do something like this: \d\d\d\d-(NOT10)-(30)

So i want to get all dates of any year, but not of the 10th month and it is important, that the day is 30.

I tried a lot to do this using negative lookahead asserations but i did not come up with any working regexes.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 485

Answers (3)

Cary Swoveland
Cary Swoveland

Reputation: 110675

It's easiest to simply convert the substring (if present) that matches /^\d{4}-10-30$/ to an empty string, then split the resulting string on one or more newlines.

If your string were

2020-10-16
2020-10-30
2020-11-12
2020-11-23

and was held by the variable str, then in Ruby, for example,

str.sub(/^\d{4}-10-30$/,'')
  #=> "2020-10-16\n\n2020-11-12\n2020-11-23\n"

so 

str.sub(/^\d{4}-10-30$/,'').split
  #=> ["2020-10-16", "2020-11-12", "2020-11-23"]

Whatever language you are using undoubtedly has similar methods.

Upvotes: 0

Burdui
Burdui

Reputation: 1302

You can use negative lookaheads:

\d\d\d\d-(?!10)\d\d-30

The Part (?!10) ensures that no 10 follows at the point where it is inserted into the regex. Notice that you still need to match the following digits afterwards, thus the \d\d part.

Generally speaking you can not (to my knowledge) negate a part that then also matches parts of the string. But with negative lookaheads you can simulate this as I did above. The generalized idea looks something like:

(?!<special-exclusion-pattern>)<general-inclusion-pattern>

Where the special-exclusion-pattern matches a subset of the general-inclusion-pattern. In the above case the general inclusion pattern is \d\d and the special exclusion pattern ins 10.

Upvotes: 3

Illya
Illya

Reputation: 1275

Try :

/20\d{2}-(?:0[1-9]|1[12])-30/

Explanation :

20\d{2} it will match 20XX

(?:0[1-9]|1[12]) it will match 0X or 11, 12

30 it will match 30

Demo :https://regex101.com/r/O2F1eV/1

Upvotes: 1

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