I came across this forum thread while trying to identify a regex for the following English statement:
Given an input string, match everything unless this input string is exactly 'bar'; for example I want to match 'barrier' and 'disbar' as well as 'foo'.
Here's the regex I came up with
^(bar.+|(?!bar).*)$
My English translation of the regex is "match the string if it starts with 'bar' and it has at least one other character, or if the string does not start with 'bar'.