Ruby Regex: Rejecting selected URLs

Question

A survey software I'm using allows to exclude sites on which the survey should be shown using Ruby based Regex (they recommend testing strings on rubular.com). I don't want to show the survey to clients that are close to finishing transaction, so excluding 3 phrases makes more sense to me than including all the rest.

How would I have to approach writing a ruby regex string that includes everything except phrases cart, order and login within the URL?

regex's aren't very good at matches like "everything that doesn't contain a particular word". But this question might be useful stackoverflow.com/questions/406230/… — Max Williams
– Max Williams, Commented May 19, 2014 at 11:45

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:57:13Z

2

The following ruby code rejects all strings in the array containing cart, order or login.

urls.reject { |url| url[/(cart|order|login)/] }

A raw regular expression which excludes words will use negative look-arounds:

^((?!login|order|cart).)*$

See rubular.

For more information, see @Max's suggested reading at Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word?

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:57

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answered May 19, 2014 at 11:38

Uri Agassi

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6 Comments

Matt Over a year ago

Rubular notified me of escaping forward slashes, which I added to your string, but then it still didnt match 1 of 4 testing URLs that didnt have any of the aforementioned phrases.

Uri Agassi Over a year ago

The forward slashes are the ruby syntax for regular expressions, much like quotes are for strings. Also, using reject throws away any matching URLs, and keeps only those which do not match.

Zlatin Zlatev Over a year ago

Matt, please could you share the failing testing URL?

Matt Over a year ago

Sure, I'm still reading various materials regarding negative lookahead, but can't seem to write such a string. Here is Uri's string with my testing URL's.

Uri Agassi Over a year ago

@Matt - we are having some misunderstanding - what I posted is ruby code, not a standalone regular expression. The raw regular expression is (cart|order|login), which selects all the URLs which contain cart,order or login.

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