Re: Help with Emacs Regex

[Bill Benedetto]

>>> Hortman, Mark writes:

  Mark> I have a rather simple regex question or two I was hoping
  Mark> someone could help me with.
  Mark>
  Mark> I need to match lines that do not begin with " and three numbers, so
  Mark> 
  Mark> "300
  Mark> "400
  Mark> "50a
  Mark> abc
  Mark> 500
  Mark> 
  Mark> I need to match all lines but the first two.  I have tried
  Mark> ^[^"0-9\{3\}]
  Mark>
  Mark> Which I, being a regex, emacs newbie interpret as search
  Mark> for all beginning of lines that dont have a " and then
  Mark> three numbers.  What gives?

Well...

^[^"] will match all lines that don't begin with a quote.  That
works in your example above.

^[^"][^0-9][^0-9] will also match and comes closer to what you
actually asked for.

Note that ^[^"][^0-9][^0-9][^0-9] *SHOULD* work except that it
doesn't work on your 3-char records.

Note too that there is probably a better way to do this but that
this seems to work.

- Bill
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Bill Benedetto     <bbenedetto@goodyear.com>    The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.
I don't speak for Goodyear and they don't speak for me.  We're both happy.