Is it possible to inverse a regular expression?

Question

this is probably not a task, but a question, now I'll explain what I want to ask.

So, backstory, there are the following input data:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor
[ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO] incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minimus veniam,
quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis aute irure http://domains.ua/ dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum
dolore eu: fugiat: nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat: cupidatat [non] proident :,
sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est labor labor. https://foo.co.uk/ *end.

The task was to find all occurrences that are in square brackets, in this line: this is: [ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO] and [non], then find all the links that begin with http/https and end with slash (/) followed by a space immediately. (correctness of references is not important)

In general, to find all these occurrences was easily, here is the regular expression (demo):

\[.*?\]|https?://[\w\.]+/\h

Is it possible to invert this regular expression so as to find everything except the conditions specified in the task? (do not highlight in square brackets and links)

Was it [this RU question](https://ru.stackoverflow.com/questions/873261)? Note OP wants a solution in JavaScript, as far as I understand. In general, the best way to get all that is not matched with a regex is to use the regex to split the string. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Aug 26 '18 at 12:57
When dealing with a regex, `preg_split('~\[.*?]|https?://[\w.]+/\h~', $s)` — Wiktor Stribiżew, Aug 26 '18 at 13:00
@WiktorStribiżew, indeed, I forgot all about her, thank you very much. — wnull, Aug 26 '18 at 13:01
If you mean a logical negation of a regex that would usually mean practically everything, you probably mean what @WiktorStribiżew said — Veltzer Doron, Aug 26 '18 at 13:26

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 26 '18 at 17:04

0

Many thanks for the help @WiktorStribiżew, think, i solved the issue the following way:

echo join('', preg_split('~\[.*?]|https?://[\w.]+/\h~', $string));

answered Aug 26 '18 at 17:04

wnull

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Come on, if you just wanted to remove the matched text, why bother with splitting? Use `preg_replace` directly. – Wiktor Stribiżew Aug 26 '18 at 17:44

Is it possible to inverse a regular expression?

1 Answers1