Re: regexp question: match anything but not a group?

[Andreas Röhler]

Am 01.04.2014 23:30, schrieb Thorsten Jolitz:
> Hi List,
>
> how can I write a regexp that acts like e.g.
>
> ,------
> | ".*?"
> `------
>
> but does not match a group like e.g.
>
> ,---------------------
> | (regexp-quote "\\)")
> `---------------------
>
> ?
>
> This works more or less but does not seem to be very robust
>
> ,---------
> | "[^)]*?"
> `---------
>
> since ')' could appear in other contexts than the group. How can I
> negate a specific group of characters and not only any occurence of
> single characters?


You need look-ahead-assertions, which aren't implemented in Emacs AFAIK.
Here is a workaround to play with:

(progn
  (and (looking-at ".*")
       (not (eq (char-after) ?\))))
  (message "%s" (match-string-no-properties 0)))

Test with more than one char ahead writing n char-after:

(not (eq (char-after (+ 1 (point)) MY-CHAR)))
(not (eq (char-after (+ 2 (point)) MY-CHAR)))