Question

Possible Duplicate:
Far Negative Lookbehind

I’ve been trying for days to get this to work. I had a similar question yesterday but it hasn’t really helped. Basically I’m trying to create a pattern that matches:

(a) where “a” can be any letter like: [a-zA-Z]. However, this should not match: paragraph (a), (b), (c), (d) or (e); because it starts with the word paragraph. If it were just (a), (b), (c), (d) or (e) then it should result in 5 matches being found.

http://regexr.com?33ka2

Answer 1

This is what you are looking for

^(?![^()]*paragraph).*?\([a-zA-Z]\)

use multiline option

---

You can instead break down the problem by first taking all the lines that doesn’t contain paragraph and then collect the individual ([a-zA-Z])

 Pattern p=Pattern.compile("^(?!.*paragraph).*$",Pattern.MULTILINE);
 Matcher m=p.matcher(input);
 while(m.find())
 {
     Matcher mm=Pattern.compile("\\([a-zA-Z]\\)").matcher(m.group(0));
     while(mm.find())
     {
         System.out.println(mm.group(0));
     }
 }