Question

Ok, so I have a phrase “foo bar” and I want to find everything BUT “foo bar”.
Here’s my text.

ipsum dolor foo bar Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do
eiusmod tempor foo bar incididunt ut labore et
dolore foo bar

There’s a way to do this just within regex right? I don’t have to go and use strings etc. do I?

RESULT:

NOTE I can’t do a nice highlighting but the bold gives you an idea (although the spaces that are before and after would also be selected but it breaks the bolding).

ipsum dolor foo bar Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do
eiusmod tempor foo bar incididunt ut labore et
dolore foo bar

Assume PCRE nomenclature.

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UPDATE 7/29/2013: it may be better to use a search and replace function in your language of choice to just ‘remove’ the phrases that you don’t want so that you are then left with the info you do want.

Answer 1

try

^(?!.*foo bar).*$

this should select every line that does not contain “foo bar”. (?! = negative lookahead)