Question

I want to write a regular expression that will match the following string

a (any substring except ‘ABC’) ABC

An example for this would be a pqrs h js ABC
The tricky part is to match any substring except ‘ABC’. Since the document in which I am searching for, can contain multiple lines that contain such pattern and I want to find all the lines separately I can’t use the following expression

a.*ABC

because this would just give me the line where the first a is found extending uptill where the last ‘ABC’ is found in the document.

There is this answer which says I can use look ahead negation but that is not working in python, or maybe in my case because there is substring before and I have not tested simply using that expression because it will not serve my purpose

Answer 1

Use the non greedy quantifier i.e ?

^a.*?ABC