Question

How to exclude certain substrings in a Perl RegEx?

Asked by: t-rude

Short description:
I need a regex that finds all strings that look like

     "..." <clark.kent@mycompany.com>

, and where ... does not include any of the words "clark", "kent" or "superman" (case-insensitive).

Because of the way the expression will be implemented into another application, I need ONE regex (not a combination), and I need a POSITIVE match (=~, not !~), and I also can't use functions via the /e switch.

Anybody an idea?

---
Background Info:
Suppose, you receive e-mails on your email-address, clark.kent@mycompany.com. Usually you receive them with SMTP addresses like "Clark Kent" <clark.kent@mycompany.com> or "Kent, C." <clark.kent@mycompany.com>.

Among these mails you receive a lot of spam that is usually sent to addresses like "Members" <clark.kent@mycompany.com> or "Newsletter Recipients" <clark.kent@mycompany.com>. The quoted part of this address always differs whereas the address part is always the same.

To do some pre-filtering of potential spam, you want to find all those mails that are sent to "some_string" <clark.kent@mycompany.com>, where "some_string" does NOT contain any of the words "clark" or "kent".

So you try to write a regex that matches exactly the above mentioned string, and this my problem. I can easily write a regex that finds all "some_string" mail addresses that _do_ have "Clark" or "Kent" in them (i.e. that _does_ contain one of a set of substrings):

if ($sendto =~ m/\".*?(clark|kent).*?\" <clark\.kent@mycompany\.com>/i)

But I utterly fail to simply do a negation on the (clark|kent) part. I've tried fiddling around with the negative lookup (?!) and some other things, but those did not work.

Any solution appreciated.

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Asked On
2003-07-02 at 05:21:29ID20666195
Tags

exclude

,

perl

,

regex

Topic

Perl Programming Language

Participating Experts
4
Points
125
Comments
11

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