Regular Expression that will Omit Words In String

[havoc433]

Does anyone now of a regular expression that will omit words in a string while replacing others?

[Taywin]

What do you mean by "words"??? If you are talking about A-Za-z, then you may use [^A-Za-z]... It means "not" A-Za-z in the reqex. Remember that the "^" must be inside []. If it is outside, it means "start with"...

[havoc433]

Actual specific words

eg omit the "and"s in the string but replace everything else with a specific word.

I've heard about negative lookaround,can that help?

[Taywin]

You mean negative lookahead of regex? You could, it will search for the first occurrence. What would you do next if you find it?

OK, if I were to do it, I would firstly replace all occurrences of the word I specified with a unique set of symbols. Then I replace all other words I don't care for. Afterward, I replace back the word I place in with unique set of symbols.

The problem I am seeing is how your text is like? Could you give me an example? Just want to be sure before I throw in an idea... I'm having some thought in a wrong way right now...

[havoc433]

Thanks for the suggestion, I figured that inverse replace is too difficult to implement with regular expressions so I did it using a similar method to the one you described above. The only difference is that I didn't change the specified word to symbols but merely checked if the other words in the string matched the specified word, if they didn't then I would replace it.

I only wanted to use regular expressions because I thought it would be simpler (less coding).