Question

8 enabled pcre and I am trying to match the \p{Po} group plus a bunch of other stuff.

I want to exclude the ampersand character. How do I exclude a specific character out of the class?

-- lua btw    
local utf8_general_punctuation_reg = "[\\p{Po}\\p{Cc}\\p{Cs}\\p{Pc}\\p{Pe}\\p{Ps}\\p{Pf}\\p{Pi}\\p{Sm}\\x{2100}-\\x{2123}\\x{2600}-\\x{26ff}]+"

Thanks in advance!

BTW \p{Po} is for utf8 http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/category/Po/list.htm

Just adding what works from the answer below:

local utf8_general_punctuation_reg = "[\\p{Po}\\p{Cc}\\p{Cs}\\p{Pc}\\p{Pe}\\p{Ps}\\p{Pf}\\p{Pi}\\p{Sm}\\x{2100}-\\x{2123}\\x{2600}-\\x{26ff}]+(?<!(&|\\.|:))"

Answer 1

You can use negative lookbehind for this. I’m not familiar with pcre syntax.

[abc](?<!b)

That regex first allows a or b or c, just look the Unicode Property allows different characters, and then disallow the b character with negative lookbehind.

The regex above will match a and c in the end but not b.