Question

I know this question has been asked many times on SO, but I can’t seem to get this to work.

I’m trying to use regular expressions to find matches for any Facebook URL, but not when the URL contains “plugins/like” (as in “http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like”)

I’ve come out with the following, and I’m not quite sure why it is not working:

https?://(www)?\.facebook\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4}/((?!plugins/like).)

Am I making a very obvious mistake? Sorry if it doesn’t make sense at all, but I’ve only trying a hand at PHP for the past five months.

Thank you very much for your time and your help.

Edit:
I’m getting matches for any FB URL so far, but it isn’t excluding anything that contains plugins/like

Answer 1

$urls = array(
    'http://www.facebook.com/',
    'https://facebook.com/plugins/foo',
    'http://facebook.ru/plugins/like',
);

$pattern = '#^https?://(www\.)?facebook\.[a-z]{2,4}/(?!plugins/like)#';

foreach ($urls as $url) {
    echo preg_match($pattern, $url) . PHP_EOL;
}

Okay?