Using Regular Expression find everything except two strings

Question

In my document I have

<Country>US</Country>
<Country>PR</Country>

Between the

<country>

and

</country>

I want to find ANYTHING except for US and PR.

For example

<country>US</country>   =  ignore
<country>PR</country>   =  ignore

<country>UP</county>    =  match found

What I have is

Pattern = "<Country>(.*?[^USPR].*?)</Country>"

but this ignores strings like

<Country>UP</Country>

Not sure how to write allowing only 2 options between the tags.. US and PR only.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 12 '13 at 14:33

3

This should work.

<country>(?!(US|PR))(.*?)</country>

Matches the opening <country> tag not followed by US or PR. Then goes on to match anything before the closing </country> tag.

answered Aug 12 '13 at 14:33

Ravi K Thapliyal

3

Note: This is using a [look-ahead](http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html). You can find more information on what that is and what it will do at the link. – Michelle Aug 12 '13 at 14:39
There's no better site on Regex than regex info. Thanks for your comment. – Ravi K Thapliyal Aug 12 '13 at 14:42
Wow got more than I asked for, this worked great! Thank you for explaining it, and the info site. – user2150312 Aug 12 '13 at 16:41

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 12 '13 at 14:36

0

Try this one:

(?<=<Country>(?!US|PR)).*?(?=</Country>)

answered Aug 12 '13 at 14:36

Alex Filipovici

2 Answers2