A regular expression to exclude a word/string

As you want to exclude both words, you need a conjuction:

^/(?!ignoreme$)(?!ignoreme2$)[a-z0-9]+$

Now both conditions must be true (neither ignoreme nor ignoreme2 is allowed) to have a match.


Here's yet another way (using a negative look-ahead):

^/(?!ignoreme|ignoreme2|ignoremeN)([a-z0-9]+)$ 

Note: There's only one capturing expression: ([a-z0-9]+).


This should do it:

^/\b([a-z0-9]+)\b(?<!ignoreme|ignoreme2|ignoreme3)

You can add as much ignored words as you like, here is a simple PHP implementation:

$ignoredWords = array('ignoreme', 'ignoreme2', 'ignoreme...');

preg_match('~^/\b([a-z0-9]+)\b(?<!' . implode('|', array_map('preg_quote', $ignoredWords)) . ')~i', $string);

Tags:

Regex