Re: regular expression question

Nicola Musatti wrote:
> Gijs wrote:
> [...]
>
>>So for example I want to have a RE that matches all strings except for
>>the string "hello". How do you do this?
>
>
> How about something like:
>
> . | .. | ... | .... | [^h][^e][^l][^l][^o] | ......*
>
> i.e. accept all strings of length different from 5 and all strings of
> length 5 that are not "hello" (I have to confess that I did read the
> other messages in this thread :-).


Your RE won't work correctly for a few reasons. First, your last term
should have seven dots, since the last one is zero-or-more. Second,
the expression isn't anchored, so the first "." will match anything.
Third, the [^h][^e][^l][^l][^o] knocks out any 5-character term with
at least one matching character in the right position, like:


hairy
meter
bolts
mauls
blamo


A correct expression that you could pass straight into egrep:


^((.?.?.?.?)|([^h]....)|(.[^e]...)|(..[^l]..)|(...[^l].)|(....[^o])|(.......*))$


--
Scott Nicol
snicol@apk.net

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