Question

I search a way with regex and java to find line of a text with some word and without some other.

Example, i would like to get line who contain both word ice and snow but do not contain tree and ski. Word order is not important.

I beginned to fine line with ice and snow

(ice)*(snow)

That seem to work but if the order is inverted, that don’t work.

edit:

is it possible to return word who have 3 letters or more between the word ice and snow

Answer 1

I agree with @RanRag that regex is overkill in this case, but here’s how it could be done anyway:

(?=.*\bice\b)(?=.*\bsnow\b)(?!.*\btree\b)(?!.*\bski\b)

(?=...) is a positive lookahead and (?!...) is a negative lookahead. The regex also uses the word boundary \b so that it won’t match parts of words.