Question

I’m trying to find the proper regular expression to select a term if it does NOT include hyphens. For example, I want to find the term debt but not debt-to-income.

I’ve got \bdebt-to-income\b which will select just debt-to-income, but I need the opposite. Help!

Answer 1

Use the following pattern: “debt” not followed by “-to-income”

\bdebt(?!-to-income)

This pattern can easily be expanded to restrict more, for example “debt-of-the-usa“:

\bdebt(?!-to-income|-of-the-usa)

You should not just look for a hyphen, because debt-free (when debt-free means nothing) should also be matched, probably.