From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2004-05-12T11:42:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Strange regexp behaviour in gsub

David Alan Black wrote:
> Hi --
> 
> Kristof Bastiaensen <kristof@vleeuwen.org> writes:
> 
> 
>>I was thinking more about something like variable-width look-between :-)
>>Meaning for example a(?^\w+)b would match any a(.*)b if (.*) is
>>not equal to (\w+)
> 
> 
> For that particular case you can use \W (opposite of \w):
> 
>   /a\W*b/  # a + zero or more non-\w + b

Not quite the same:

/a\W*b/ =~ "a%xb"
# => nil

It sounded like the OP wanted an re that matched "a%xb", because "%x" is 
"not equal to (\w+)". Sort of like:

/a(?!\w+b).*b/ =~ "a%xb"
# => 0