Q for regexp experts

Harald Kirsch kirschh at lionbioscience.com
Fri Dec 8 10:09:33 EST 2000


Even with perl-compatible regular expressions it seems to be
impossible to specify a pattern which matches 

   `the longest substring not containing separator' SEP

Put another way, from a given starting point, the pattern shall match
everything until just before the next occurence of SEP. A first
attempt is something like

   [^SEP]*

but this disallows S', 'E' and 'P' in between the separators.

I tried something like (.(?!SEP))+ but it somehow does not work. Is it
at all possible to get this to work with regular expressions?

  Harald Kirsch

-- 
----------------+------------------------------------------------------
Harald Kirsch   | kirschh at lionbioscience.com | "How old is the epsilon?"
LION Bioscience | +49 6221 4038 172          |        -- Paul Erdös




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