Zugg Software :: View topic - Pattern matching: Matching everything except a given string

Newbie Joined: 11 Jul 2004 Posts: 4 Location: USA

I would like to be able to match everything except a given string. For example, if I did not want to match "hello", the pattern would match "goodbye", "book", and "jump"--that is, everything except "hello".

According to the ZMUD documentation, this is accomplished using {^string}, where string is the text to exclude. Only problem is, this doesn't seem to work when I follow it up with a pattern that matches a list of possible things using the {..|...|..} syntax. For example, "{^one} two" matches "apple two" correctly and does not match "one two" correctly. However, "{^one} {two|three}" does NOT match "apple two" or "banana three", as one would expect.

I have no unusual options enabled, such as interpreting the trigger pattern as a Perl RE.

Any thoughts? Thanks for any input!

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

This is a bug in zMud. For the time being you will have to get around it by converting to a regex and then modifying it to be correct.

Your pattern of "{^one} {two|three}" would be correctly converted as "(?:(?!one)(?<!one)) (?:two|three)"

Newbie Joined: 11 Jul 2004 Posts: 4 Location: USA

OK, thanks a lot. I thought something might be amiss... thanks for clearing up my headache!