Question

I have a regex I need to match against a path like so: “C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\ScanSnap\382893.pd~“. I need a regex that matches all paths except those ending in ‘~’ or ‘.dat‘. The problem I am having is that I don’t understand how to match and negate the exact string ‘.dat‘ and only at the end of the path. i.e. I don’t want to match {d,a,t} elsewhere in the path.

I have built the regex, but need to not match .dat

[\w\s:\.\\]*[^~]$[^\.dat]

[\w\s:\.\\]* This matches all words, whitespace, the colon, periods, and backspaces.
[^~]$[^\.dat]$ This causes matches ending in ‘~’ to fail. It seems that I should be able to follow up with a negated match for ‘.dat’, but the match fails in my regex tester.

I think my answer lies in grouping judging from what I’ve read, would someone point me in the right direction? I should add, I am using a file watching program that allows regex matching, I have only one line to specify the regex.

This entry seems similar: Regex to match multiple strings

Answer 1

You want to use a negative look-ahead:

^((?!\.dat$)[\w\s:\.\\])*$

By the way, your character group ([\w\s:\.\\]) doesn’t allow a tilde (~) in it. Did you intend to allow a tilde in the filename if it wasn’t at the end? If so:

^((?!~$|\.dat$)[\w\s:\.\\~])*$