Re^2: Boolean operators in PERL regexp?

[lenrobert]

Friedo, Enlinl, Ikegami, thank you for your responses.

Yes, my problem might be easily solved with an HTML parser, but beyond my question in my opinion a logical NOT would be essential for regexps. Lookahead and lookbehind assertions are very good, the only fatal problem with them, that they are non-capturing, i.e. I cannot extract non-matching. Maybe there is a reason for this, I don't know.

Robert

[ikegami]

Whatcha talking about?

                                            NOT /XYZ/
                                          vvvvvvvvvvvvv
>perl -e "$_ = 'ABCDEFGHIJKL'; print(/ABC((?:(?!XYZ).)*)JKL/);"
DEFGHI

[lenrobert]

Ikegami, you're right. As it seems I needed some more help to use your code. Now it works, the final version is:
/(<a href=("|))((?:(?!("|\/|#|javascript)).)*)(\s|"|>)/gi
And $3 is the value of the href property.
Thank you.