Regular expression for a string containing one word but not another

Question

I\'m setting up some goals in Google Analytics and could use a little regex help.

Lets say I have 4 URLs

http://www.anydotcom.com/test/search.cfm?met         


        

Answer 1

^(?=.*selector=size)(?:(?!details\.cfm).)+$

If your regex engine supported posessive quantifiers (though I suspect Google Analytics does not), then I guess this will perform better for large input sets:

^[^?]*+(?<!details\.cfm).*?selector=size.*$

Answer 2

I was looking for a way to avoid --line-buffered on a tail in a similar situation as the OP and Kobi's solution works great for me. In my case excluding lines with either "bot" or "spider" while including ' / ' (for my root document).

My original command:

tail -f mylogfile | grep --line-buffered -v 'bot\|spider' | grep ' / '

Now becomes (with -P perl switch):

tail -f mylogfile | grep -P '^(?!.*(bot|spider)).*\s\/\s.*$'

Answer 3

This should do it:

^(?!.*details\.cfm).*selector=size.*$

^.*selector=size.*$ should be clear enough. The first bit, (?!.*details.cfm) is a negative look-ahead: before matching the string it checks the string does not contain "details.cfm" (with any number of characters before it).

Answer 4

regex could be (perl syntax):

`/^[(^(?!.*details\.cfm).*selector=size.*)|(selector=size.*^(?!.*details\.cfm).*)]$/`