'negative' pattern matching in python

See it in action:

matchObj = re.search("^(?!OK|\\.).*", item)

Don't forget to put .* after negative look-ahead, otherwise you couldn't get any match ;-)

 if not (line.startswith("OK ") or line.strip() == "."):
     print line

Use a negative match. (Also note that whitespace is significant, by default, inside a regex so don't space things out. Alternatively, use re.VERBOSE.)

for item in output:
    matchObj = re.search("^(OK|\\.)", item)
    if not matchObj:
        print "got item " + item