Question

I need to build a regular expression for all nonempty sequences of letters other than : file, for,from.

So I should end up getting all the values from my text input excluding the above 3 words.

Is this a correct way to represent it?

^(?:(?!file|for|from).)*$

Also I was trying to use this regex pattern in my java program and assumed it should work. But it does not.

My sample code is as follows:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("^(?:(?!file|for|from).)*$");

// Split input with the pattern

String[] result = 

         p.split("file is not there from for this time for this test");

for (int i=0; i<result.length; i++)

    System.out.println(result[i]);

Is there an error in my regex or is there some error with the way I am using regex in java?

Please advise.

Thank you.

Answer 1

You should do something like this:

String s = "file is not there from for this time for this test";
String[] splits = s.split("file|from|for");