Question

I’m trying to match all files except those ending with .bmp.

Due to some constraints I can’t use negation (?:, !:) and references (\1, …).

I’ve made an expression and it works for most of the strings:

^\w+\.([^b].*|b|b[^m].*|bm|bm[^p].*|bmp.+)$

It matches everything that doesn’t end with .bmp – including test.txt, test.bmp.txt, etc.
But unfourtanely, it does allow test.bi.bmp.

Any idea on how to improve the regex so it would just match files not ending with .bmp?

Answer 1

why not:

^.*[^p]$|^.*[^m]p$|^.*[^b]mp$|^.*[^.]bmp$

?

http://regexr.com?31vg7

An alternative is ^.*([^p]|[^m]p|[^b]mp|[^.]bmp)$ (shorter).