Regexp - string is not followed by character and does not...

[Ellie]

I have this line:

return "[a-z]$scheme*:/{2}(??:[a-z0-9\-._~!$&'($inline*+,;=|]+|%[\dA-F]{2})+|[0-9.]+|\[[a-z0-9.]+:[a-z0-9.]+:[a-z0-9.:]+\])(?::\d*)?(?:/(?:[a-z0-9\-._~!$&'($inline*+,;=|]+|%[\dA-F]{2})*)*(?:\?(?:[a-z0-9\-._~!$&'($inline*+,;=/?|]+|%[\dA-F]{2})*)?(?:\#(?:[a-z0-9\-._~!$&'($inline*+,;=/?|]+|%[\dA-F]{2})*)?";



It's got regexp in it for defining a url.


What I need to do is add something in there for:

--- and is not followed by "["


http://www.hbgames.org <---- this should be fine (followed by no characters)
http://www.hbgames.org <---- this should be fine too (followed by a space)
http://www.hbgames.org[ <---- this should not
http://www.hbgames.org[/img] <---- this should not either


I really don't have a clue what I'm doing here and am hoping this is possible.

Anyone have any ideas?



Hopefully you can see the problem above. The code is generating the automatic hyperlink from the url. I want it to not do that for anything followed by [, as I have something special planned for that.

 

[e]

that is the worst, longest regexp i have ever seen. A proper URL matcher is usually much shorter than this. Do you really need to use that one?

EDIT:

Ok, so you'd take the current regexp, but add at the end: (?!\[)

I think that'd do it, but then again I have no idea what operation you're applying on the regexp.

Basically, you'll want to use negative look ahead on your expression. http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html