Question

Using my text editor of choice, Sublime 2, I want to search through code that has uncommented alerts. So I need a regex for that finds “alert” but not “//alert” or “// alert”. I don’t know how to invert and then combine the two results. Sublime Text uses the Boost syntax for regular expressions. Thank you for any help.

Answer 1

You can search for text not preceeded by //, thus

(?<!\/\/\s?)alert

EDIT:
If the editor doesn’t support variable lookbehinds you must specify all the possibilities in different lookbehinds

(?<!\/\/\s)(?<!\/\/)alert