How to match anything but two words using regex

In this post we will see javascript regular expression that will match anything but two words.

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Problem

From below list we need to find all word except ‘foad’ and ‘foed’.

const str = 'foad food fold ford foed';

Lets start with simple regular expression where we will use the opening and closing square brackets of regular expression with ‘a’ and ‘e’ as below:-

str.match(/fo[ae]d/g); // Output ['foad', 'foed']

Final Solution

So we have output of the two words that we do not want. Now we can simply add a ‘^’ char at the start of ‘ae’ which will negate the current output. So out new expression will be:-

str.match(/fo[^ae]d/g); // Output ['food', 'fold', 'ford']

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Conclusion

Hope you like the short explanation on how we can use a regular expression that will match anything but two words. See you in my next post. Till then enjoy coding 🙂

Further Reading

Javascript regex

How to find all string between two characters using Javascript regex