regular express : how to exclude multiple character groups?

Question

I have a set of urls :

/products

/categories

/customers

Now say a customers is named john, and I want to help john to reac

Answer 1

You're trying to use a negated character class the wrong way. A negated character class says 'do not match the contained characters'. What you are wanting to say is 'do not match if this stuff I specified here exists'. To do that you have to a bit more creative. Probably need some negative lookbehind. I'm not 100% sure about php's regex engine but something similar to this should work.

/^\/(?

so, negative lookbehind (? saying don't match the .+ if products or categories or admin precede it. Then that is in a non-capturing group (?: ... ).

Check out Regular Expression Advanced Syntax Reference for extra help.