On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 01:24:45PM -0600, Luke Palmer wrote: > > > [Negative matching] > > > a generic negative, multi-byte string matching mechanism. Any thoughts? > > Am I missing something already present or otherwise obvious? > > Maybe I'm misundertanding the question, but I think you want negative > lookahead: > > Perl 5: /(.*)(?!>union)/ > Perl 6: /(.*) <!before: union>/ > > Luke
no, that doesn't work, because of the way regexes operate. The '.*' captures everything, and since the string after everything (ie: the end of the string) doesn't match 'union', the regex succeeds without backtracking. Try it: perl -e ' $a = "this has the string union in it"; my ($b) = ($a =~ m"(.*)(?!>union)"); print $b;' prints: this has the string union in it not 'this has the string'. Ed
