Regular expression inbetween two strings, excluding string

Question

I am trying to use regex to select the constants from the XML below where the constant is anything COM_CCJET_FORM_ * _NAME Except when the constant contains either FIRST_NAME or LAST_NAME

<field name="name" type="text" filter="safehtml" class="input-xxlarge input-large-text"
label="COM_CCJET_FORM_LBL_WORKORDER_NAME" description="COM_CCJET_FORM_DESC_WORKORDER_NAME" required="true"
hint="COM_CCJET_FORM_LBL_WORKORDER_NAME" />

<field name="first_name" type="text"
label="COM_CCJET_FORM_LBL_CONTRACTOR_FIRST_NAME" description="COM_CCJET_FORM_DESC_CONTRACTOR_FIRST_NAME"
required="true" menu_published="0" filter="string" directory_stripext="true"
directory_hidenode="true" directory_hidedefault="true"
alias_generator="2135354" heading="h4" close="true" option_on="Yes"
option_off="Yes" />

I am able to get anything that has COM_CCJET_FORM_*_NAME with the regex:

COM_CCJET_(.*?)_NAME

But I can't figure out how to tell the regex to exclude "FIRST"

L3viathan · Accepted Answer · 2018-05-09 17:27:14Z

1

Use negative lookbehinds:

COM_CCJET_([^"]*?)(?<!FIRST|LAST)_NAME

Demo

edited May 9, 2018 at 17:27

answered May 9, 2018 at 17:23

L3viathan

27.5k2 gold badges63 silver badges84 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

7 Comments

Tom Lord Over a year ago

Or equivalently, ...(?<!FIRST|LAST)...

Chad Caldwell Over a year ago

Nice! I can accept correct answer in 9 min (so SE tells me). Thanks!

Tom Lord Over a year ago

Also, I would suggest something like \w+ instead of .*? - since the latter could get all sorts of weird matches for odd input e.g. label="COM_CCJET_FOO" ... label="COM_CCJET_FORM_LBL_WORKORDER_NAME"

L3viathan Over a year ago

@TomLord I tried it with an additional set of parens first, and regex101 told me that assertions have to be fixed-length. Updating

Tom Lord Over a year ago

It depends on the regex library. Since OP didn't mention which language/tool they're using, I don't know what's supported (including whether or not negative lookbehinds are supported!)

|

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Regular expression inbetween two strings, excluding string

1 Answer 1

7 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

7 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related