Question

I am trying to match the following text (anywhere in the string) where string can be anything between A and ;

Astring;

However I don’t want to match the following

aAstring;
AAstring;

The expression (?<![A|a])A.*?; works ok for aAstring; but not for AAstring;

It seems that the lookaround doesn’t work for the same character? I must be missing something simple here.

Answer 1

First, that’s a lookbehind, not a lookahead. To understand what’s going on here, break down what the regex is saying:

(?<![A|a])A #An A that is not preceded by A, a, or a literal |
.?;         #Any number of characters followed by ;

Now consider your input, AAstring:

A       #An A that is not preceded by A (because it's at the beginning of the string)
Astring #Some characters followed by ;

So the lookbehind is working, it just doesn’t do what you think it does. I think what you want is something like this:

^(?![Aa]{2})A.*?;

That anchors itself to the beginning of the string, so you know where the lookahead is going to look. Here’s what it means:

^           #Beginning of the line
(?![Aa]{2}) #"The following string must not start with two As in a row, regardless of case"
A.*?;       #Capital A followed by anything followed by ;

You could also try

\b(?![Aa]{2})A.*?; 

if your target isn’t at the very beginning of the line.

Note that this is actually the same as ^A(?![Aa]).*?; or \bA(?![Aa]).*?;, but the above might be easier to understand.