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• • July 21, 2010 at 8:55 am #56423
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    Is there any way I can get a grep search to look for everything except a certain string?

    For example, the search string “a .+ night” would match “a cold, quiet night”, “a warm, muggy night”, “a cool, dark night” and “a freezing cold night”. Is there any way I can tell it to ignore the phrases containing the word “cold”, and match all the others?

  • July 21, 2010 at 11:07 am #56425
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    as(?!cold).+snight

    something like that

  • July 22, 2010 at 1:25 am #56430
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    Eugene Tyson said:

    as(?!cold).+snight

    ---

    That still matches 'a freezing cold night' (it only eliminates matches where 'cold' is the first word after 'a'). The word 'cold' might appear anywhere ('a cold and gloomy night').

    If I try changing it to

    as(.+)?(?!cold)(.+)?snight

    then all the phrases containing 'cold' start getting matched as well, as .+ matches anything including 'cold'.

    It might not be possible for GREP to do what I want, because it processes strings linearly, and to do this properly I think it would have to get to the end of the phrase and see whether it ended in 'night' before skipping back and seeing if it had encountered a 'cold' anywhere along its length.

  • July 22, 2010 at 1:53 am #56431
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Sure it's possible! It's a matter of grouping:

    as((?!cold).)+?snight

    works, because the outer parentheses group is what gets repeated, and inside the parentheses every single character is checked to not have 'cold' in front of it.

    For added fun, you can add word boundaries before and after 'cold', so it will not reject 'a scolding hot night'

    as((?!bcoldb).)+?snight

    (Ed.: Added '?' after the pluses so it will match shortest possible strings only — usually, that's what you'd want.)

  • July 23, 2010 at 3:07 am #56438
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    Ah, fantastic! That's exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!

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