How do I negate a set of characters together in a Regular Expression? Ex: [^<\/a>] (When you find stop matching)

Question

How do I negate a set of characters together in Regular Expression? Ex: [^</a>] (When you find stop matching) when I do this way the code stops when it finds an "a" in the text

How do I do to negate a set of characters

This is the expression:

$string = "<a href='asdasd'>lalalala</a>";
preg_match('/<a href=.*?>([^<\/a>]+)/',$string,$res);

Answer 1

You can use negative lookahead:

.(?!</a>)

will match any character not followed by </a>.

Thus, to match a whole string that doesn't contain </a>:

^(.(?!</a>))*$

Answer 2

As simpler alternative to an assertion one could just match text content, stop at tag delimiters:

 preg_match('/<a href=.*?>([^<>]+)/', $string, $res);