Can I negate the dot?

Question

The following regular expression matches the character a:

"a"

The following regular expression matches all characters except a:

"[^a]"

The following regular expression matches a ton of characters:

"."

How do I match everything that is not matched by "."? I can't use the same technique as above:

"[^.]"

because inside the brackets, the . changes meaning and only stands for the character . itself :(

The only things that `.` doesn't match is _possibly_ line terminators, which you can include with `DOTALL`. Is this behavior you really need? — Sotirios Delimanolis, Oct 03 '14 at 18:17
@LittleBobbyTables - I don't think that's what Fred's trying to do. — Don Roby, Oct 03 '14 at 18:18
@DonRoby - this is why I should stay out of [regex] questions ;) — LittleBobbyTables - Au Revoir, Oct 03 '14 at 18:19
@SotiriosDelimanolis I was curious if there was a simpler way to answer [question 454908](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/454908/) with something like `"[^.]"` — fredoverflow, Oct 03 '14 at 18:19
. matches any character, so the negation of that would be "don't match any character"? Why would you want to do this? — ControlAltDel, Oct 03 '14 at 18:20

Avinash Raj · Answer 1 · 2014-10-03T23:50:58.143

3

The below negative lookahead will work.

(?:(?!.)[\S\s])

Java regex would be,

"(?:(?!.)[\\S\\s])"

DEMO

The idea behind the above regex is, it would match only \r or \n or \t or \f that is the characters which aren't matched by a dot (Multiline mode).

edited Oct 03 '14 at 23:50

answered Oct 03 '14 at 18:18

Avinash Raj

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Match the character from the list `\S` or `\s` if it's not matched by a dot. So it will end up with `\r` or `\n` or `\t` or `\f` – Avinash Raj Oct 03 '14 at 18:33

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 06 '14 at 05:32

0

"[^\\.]"

use double backslash for regex used character. for example

\\.\\]\\[\\-\\)\\(\\?

answered Oct 06 '14 at 05:32

tsogtgerel.ts

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may i know what your regex does actually? – Avinash Raj Oct 06 '14 at 15:55
match any character except dot. – tsogtgerel.ts Feb 16 '16 at 13:23

Can I negate the dot?

2 Answers2