How can I exclude some characters from a class?

Question

Say I want to match a \"word\" character (\\w), but exclude \"_\", or match a whitespace character (\\s), but exclude \"\\t\". How can I do this? <

Answer 1

Use a negated class including \W or \S.

/[^\W_]/  # anything that's not a non-word character and not _
/[^\S\t]/ # anything that's not a non-space character and not \t