Question

I’m having trouble with a regex, so I figured I’d ask here. Basically, I need it to match URI’s for a collection, except for a certain one (/new).

i.e.:

/properties     # match
/properties/25  # match
/properties/new # rejected

I’ve tried variations on the following, to no avail:

/properties(^(/new)).*

I think my trouble is with the negation, but I can’t quite grok what I’m meant to be doing.. An explanation with the solution would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

^ negates inside a character class (a group of characters in any order surrounded by [ ]. You need to use ?!. You also shouldn’t use .*. It doesn’t add anything. If you want to match anything you just don’t put anything :). Also you don’t need to capture the match. Depending on how you’re setting it up you may also need to escape the slashes ( / )

Try this:

\/properties(?!\/new)