Question

I’ve found the way to do this is using negative – lookahead and / or posistive lookbehind but I don’t seem to find how to type it.

I’m trying to highlight all the lines where the word length is not present

I’m writing ( without success ) /length\@!/

What would be the correct way?

Answer 1

Try /^\(\(length\)\@!.\)*$/

This is basically ^.*$ where . can’t be followed by length.

In perl regex, it’d be ^((?!length).)*$.

(Make sure you have :set hlsearch to actually highlight all the relevant lines).