How to negate specific word in regex? [duplicate]

Answer 1

I had a list of file names, and I wanted to exclude certain ones, with this sort of behavior (Ruby):

files = [
  'mydir/states.rb',      # don't match these
  'countries.rb',
  'mydir/states_bkp.rb',  # match these
  'mydir/city_states.rb' 
]
excluded = ['states', 'countries']

# set my_rgx here

result = WankyAPI.filter(files, my_rgx)  # I didn't write WankyAPI...
assert result == ['mydir/city_states.rb', 'mydir/states_bkp.rb']

Here's my solution:

excluded_rgx = excluded.map{|e| e+'\.'}.join('|')
my_rgx = /(^|\/)((?!#{excluded_rgx})[^\.\/]*)\.rb$/

My assumptions for this application:

• The string to be excluded is at the beginning of the input, or immediately following a slash.
• The permitted strings end with .rb.
• Permitted filenames don't have a . character before the .rb.