Question

I am looking for a regex that will match a string that starts with one substring and does not end with a certain substring.

Example:

// Updated to be correct, thanks @Apocalisp ^foo.*(?<!bar)$ 

Should match anything that starts with ‘foo’ and doesn’t end with ‘bar’. I know about the [^…] syntax, but I can’t find anything that will do that for a string instead of single characters.

I am specifically trying to do this for Java’s regex, but I’ve run into this before so answers for other regex engines would be great too.

Thanks to @Kibbee for verifying that this works in C# as well.

Answer 1

I think in this case you want negative lookbehind, like so:

foo.*(?<!bar)