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Python - Extract the words in a sentence that occur before a set of words [duplicate]

My regex pattern looks something like
<xxxx location="file path/level1/level2" xxxx some="xxx">
I am only interested in the part in quotes assigned to location. Shouldn't it be as easy as below without the greedy switch?
/.*location="(.*)".*/
Does not seem to work.

You need to make your regular expression lazy/non-greedy, because by default, "(.*)" will match all of "file path/level1/level2" xxx some="xxx".
Instead you can make your dot-star non-greedy, which will make it match as few characters as possible:
/location="(.*?)"/
Adding a ? on a quantifier (?, * or +) makes it non-greedy.
Note: this is only available in regex engines which implement the Perl 5 extensions (Java, Ruby, Python, etc) but not in "traditional" regex engines (including Awk, sed, grep without -P, etc.).

location="(.*)" will match from the " after location= until the " after some="xxx unless you make it non-greedy.
So you either need .*? (i.e. make it non-greedy by adding ?) or better replace .* with [^"]*.
[^"] Matches any character except for a " <quotation-mark>
More generic: [^abc] - Matches any character except for an a, b or c

How about
.*location="([^"]*)".*
This avoids the unlimited search with .* and will match exactly to the first quote.

Use non-greedy matching, if your engine supports it. Add the ? inside the capture.
/location="(.*?)"/

Use of Lazy quantifiers ? with no global flag is the answer.
Eg,
If you had global flag /g then, it would have matched all the lowest length matches as below.

Here's another way.
Here's the one you want. This is lazy [\s\S]*?
The first item:
[\s\S]*?(?:location="[^"]*")[\s\S]* Replace with: $1
Explaination: https://regex101.com/r/ZcqcUm/2
For completeness, this gets the last one. This is greedy [\s\S]*
The last item:[\s\S]*(?:location="([^"]*)")[\s\S]*
Replace with: $1
Explaination: https://regex101.com/r/LXSPDp/3
There's only 1 difference between these two regular expressions and that is the ?

The other answers here fail to spell out a full solution for regex versions which don't support non-greedy matching. The greedy quantifiers (.*?, .+? etc) are a Perl 5 extension which isn't supported in traditional regular expressions.
If your stopping condition is a single character, the solution is easy; instead of
a(.*?)b
you can match
a[^ab]*b
i.e specify a character class which excludes the starting and ending delimiiters.
In the more general case, you can painstakingly construct an expression like
start(|[^e]|e(|[^n]|n(|[^d])))end
to capture a match between start and the first occurrence of end. Notice how the subexpression with nested parentheses spells out a number of alternatives which between them allow e only if it isn't followed by nd and so forth, and also take care to cover the empty string as one alternative which doesn't match whatever is disallowed at that particular point.
Of course, the correct approach in most cases is to use a proper parser for the format you are trying to parse, but sometimes, maybe one isn't available, or maybe the specialized tool you are using is insisting on a regular expression and nothing else.

Because you are using quantified subpattern and as descried in Perl Doc,
By default, a quantified subpattern is "greedy", that is, it will
match as many times as possible (given a particular starting location)
while still allowing the rest of the pattern to match. If you want it
to match the minimum number of times possible, follow the quantifier
with a "?" . Note that the meanings don't change, just the
"greediness":
*? //Match 0 or more times, not greedily (minimum matches)
+? //Match 1 or more times, not greedily
Thus, to allow your quantified pattern to make minimum match, follow it by ? :
/location="(.*?)"/

import regex
text = 'ask her to call Mary back when she comes back'
p = r'(?i)(?s)call(.*?)back'
for match in regex.finditer(p, str(text)):
print (match.group(1))
Output:
Mary

Inverse regex match on group in Python

I see a lot of similarly worded questions, but I've had a strikingly difficult time coming up with the syntax for this.
Given a list of words, I want to print all the words that do not have special characters.
I have a regex which identifies words with special characters \w*[\u00C0-\u01DA']\w*. I've seen a lot of answers with fairly straightforward scenarios like a simple word. However, I haven't been able to find anything that negates a group - I've seen several different sets of syntax to include the negative lookahead ?!, but I haven't been able to come up with a syntax that works with it.
In my case given a string like: "should print nŌt thìs"
should print should and print but not the other two words. re.findall("(\w*[\u00C0-\u01DA']\w*)", paragraph.text) gives you the special characters - I just want to invert that.

For this particular case, you can simply specify the regular alphabet range in your search:
a = "should print nŌt thìs"
re.findall(r"(\b[A-Za-z]+\b)", a)
# ['should', 'print']
Of course you can add digits or anything else you want to match as well.
As for negative lookaheads, they use the syntax (?!...), with ? before !, and they must be in parentheses. To use one here, you can use:
r"\b(?!\w*[À-ǚ])\w*"
This:
Checks for a word boundary \b, like a space or the start of the input string.
Does the negative lookahead and stops the match if it finds any special character preceded by 0 or more word characters. You have to include the \w* because (?![À-ǚ]) would only check for the special character being the first letter in the word.
Finally, if it makes it past the lookahead, it matches any word characters.
Demo. Note in regex101.com you must specify Python flavor for \b to work properly with special characters.
There is a third option as well:
r"\b[^À-ǚ\s]*\b"
The middle part [^À-ǚ\s]* means match any character other than special characters or whitespace an unlimited number of times.

I know this is not a regex, but just a completely different idea you may not have had besides using regexes. I suppose it would be also much slower but I think it works:
>>> import unicodedata as ud
>>> [word for word in ['Cá', 'Lá', 'Aqui']\
if any(['WITH' in ud.name(letter) for letter in word])]
['Cá', 'Lá']
Or use ... 'WITH' not in to reverse.

capture anything but string [duplicate]

I know it's possible to match a word and then reverse the matches using other tools (e.g. grep -v). However, is it possible to match lines that do not contain a specific word, e.g. hede, using a regular expression?
Input:
hoho
hihi
haha
hede
Code:
grep "<Regex for 'doesn't contain hede'>" input
Desired output:
hoho
hihi
haha

The notion that regex doesn't support inverse matching is not entirely true. You can mimic this behavior by using negative look-arounds:
^((?!hede).)*$
The regex above will match any string, or line without a line break, not containing the (sub)string 'hede'. As mentioned, this is not something regex is "good" at (or should do), but still, it is possible.
And if you need to match line break chars as well, use the DOT-ALL modifier (the trailing s in the following pattern):
/^((?!hede).)*$/s
or use it inline:
/(?s)^((?!hede).)*$/
(where the /.../ are the regex delimiters, i.e., not part of the pattern)
If the DOT-ALL modifier is not available, you can mimic the same behavior with the character class [\s\S]:
/^((?!hede)[\s\S])*$/
Explanation
A string is just a list of n characters. Before, and after each character, there's an empty string. So a list of n characters will have n+1 empty strings. Consider the string "ABhedeCD":
┌──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┐
S = │e1│ A │e2│ B │e3│ h │e4│ e │e5│ d │e6│ e │e7│ C │e8│ D │e9│
└──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┘
index 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
where the e's are the empty strings. The regex (?!hede). looks ahead to see if there's no substring "hede" to be seen, and if that is the case (so something else is seen), then the . (dot) will match any character except a line break. Look-arounds are also called zero-width-assertions because they don't consume any characters. They only assert/validate something.
So, in my example, every empty string is first validated to see if there's no "hede" up ahead, before a character is consumed by the . (dot). The regex (?!hede). will do that only once, so it is wrapped in a group, and repeated zero or more times: ((?!hede).)*. Finally, the start- and end-of-input are anchored to make sure the entire input is consumed: ^((?!hede).)*$
As you can see, the input "ABhedeCD" will fail because on e3, the regex (?!hede) fails (there is "hede" up ahead!).

Note that the solution to does not start with “hede”:
^(?!hede).*$
is generally much more efficient than the solution to does not contain “hede”:
^((?!hede).)*$
The former checks for “hede” only at the input string’s first position, rather than at every position.

If you're just using it for grep, you can use grep -v hede to get all lines which do not contain hede.
ETA Oh, rereading the question, grep -v is probably what you meant by "tools options".

Answer:
^((?!hede).)*$
Explanation:
^the beginning of the string,
( group and capture to \1 (0 or more times (matching the most amount possible)),
(?! look ahead to see if there is not,
hede your string,
) end of look-ahead,
. any character except \n,
)* end of \1 (Note: because you are using a quantifier on this capture, only the LAST repetition of the captured pattern will be stored in \1)
$ before an optional \n, and the end of the string

The given answers are perfectly fine, just an academic point:
Regular Expressions in the meaning of theoretical computer sciences ARE NOT ABLE do it like this. For them it had to look something like this:
^([^h].*$)|(h([^e].*$|$))|(he([^h].*$|$))|(heh([^e].*$|$))|(hehe.+$)
This only does a FULL match. Doing it for sub-matches would even be more awkward.

If you want the regex test to only fail if the entire string matches, the following will work:
^(?!hede$).*
e.g. -- If you want to allow all values except "foo" (i.e. "foofoo", "barfoo", and "foobar" will pass, but "foo" will fail), use: ^(?!foo$).*
Of course, if you're checking for exact equality, a better general solution in this case is to check for string equality, i.e.
myStr !== 'foo'
You could even put the negation outside the test if you need any regex features (here, case insensitivity and range matching):
!/^[a-f]oo$/i.test(myStr)
The regex solution at the top of this answer may be helpful, however, in situations where a positive regex test is required (perhaps by an API).

FWIW, since regular languages (aka rational languages) are closed under complementation, it's always possible to find a regular expression (aka rational expression) that negates another expression. But not many tools implement this.
Vcsn supports this operator (which it denotes {c}, postfix).
You first define the type of your expressions: labels are letter (lal_char) to pick from a to z for instance (defining the alphabet when working with complementation is, of course, very important), and the "value" computed for each word is just a Boolean: true the word is accepted, false, rejected.
In Python:
In [5]: import vcsn
c = vcsn.context('lal_char(a-z), b')
c
Out[5]: {a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z} → 𝔹
then you enter your expression:
In [6]: e = c.expression('(hede){c}'); e
Out[6]: (hede)^c
convert this expression to an automaton:
In [7]: a = e.automaton(); a
finally, convert this automaton back to a simple expression.
In [8]: print(a.expression())
\e+h(\e+e(\e+d))+([^h]+h([^e]+e([^d]+d([^e]+e[^]))))[^]*
where + is usually denoted |, \e denotes the empty word, and [^] is usually written . (any character). So, with a bit of rewriting ()|h(ed?)?|([^h]|h([^e]|e([^d]|d([^e]|e.)))).*.
You can see this example here, and try Vcsn online there.

Here's a good explanation of why it's not easy to negate an arbitrary regex. I have to agree with the other answers, though: if this is anything other than a hypothetical question, then a regex is not the right choice here.

With negative lookahead, regular expression can match something not contains specific pattern. This is answered and explained by Bart Kiers. Great explanation!
However, with Bart Kiers' answer, the lookahead part will test 1 to 4 characters ahead while matching any single character. We can avoid this and let the lookahead part check out the whole text, ensure there is no 'hede', and then the normal part (.*) can eat the whole text all at one time.
Here is the improved regex:
/^(?!.*?hede).*$/
Note the (*?) lazy quantifier in the negative lookahead part is optional, you can use (*) greedy quantifier instead, depending on your data: if 'hede' does present and in the beginning half of the text, the lazy quantifier can be faster; otherwise, the greedy quantifier be faster. However if 'hede' does not present, both would be equal slow.
Here is the demo code.
For more information about lookahead, please check out the great article: Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind.
Also, please check out RegexGen.js, a JavaScript Regular Expression Generator that helps to construct complex regular expressions. With RegexGen.js, you can construct the regex in a more readable way:
var _ = regexGen;
var regex = _(
_.startOfLine(),
_.anything().notContains( // match anything that not contains:
_.anything().lazy(), 'hede' // zero or more chars that followed by 'hede',
// i.e., anything contains 'hede'
),
_.endOfLine()
);

Benchmarks
I decided to evaluate some of the presented Options and compare their performance, as well as use some new Features.
Benchmarking on .NET Regex Engine: http://regexhero.net/tester/
Benchmark Text:
The first 7 lines should not match, since they contain the searched Expression, while the lower 7 lines should match!
Regex Hero is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
XRegex Hero is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
Regex HeroRegex HeroRegex HeroRegex HeroRegex Hero is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
Regex Her Regex Her Regex Her Regex Her Regex Her Regex Her Regex Hero is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
Regex Her is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.Regex Hero
egex Hero egex Hero egex Hero egex Hero egex Hero egex Hero Regex Hero is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRegex Hero is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
Regex Her
egex Hero
egex Hero is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
Regex Her is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
Regex Her Regex Her Regex Her Regex Her Regex Her Regex Her is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
Nobody is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
Regex Her o egex Hero Regex Hero Reg ex Hero is a real-time online Silverlight Regular Expression Tester.
Results:
Results are Iterations per second as the median of 3 runs - Bigger Number = Better
01: ^((?!Regex Hero).)*$ 3.914 // Accepted Answer
02: ^(?:(?!Regex Hero).)*$ 5.034 // With Non-Capturing group
03: ^(?!.*?Regex Hero).* 7.356 // Lookahead at the beginning, if not found match everything
04: ^(?>[^R]+|R(?!egex Hero))*$ 6.137 // Lookahead only on the right first letter
05: ^(?>(?:.*?Regex Hero)?)^.*$ 7.426 // Match the word and check if you're still at linestart
06: ^(?(?=.*?Regex Hero)(?#fail)|.*)$ 7.371 // Logic Branch: Find Regex Hero? match nothing, else anything
P1: ^(?(?=.*?Regex Hero)(*FAIL)|(*ACCEPT)) ????? // Logic Branch in Perl - Quick FAIL
P2: .*?Regex Hero(*COMMIT)(*FAIL)|(*ACCEPT) ????? // Direct COMMIT & FAIL in Perl
Since .NET doesn't support action Verbs (*FAIL, etc.) I couldn't test the solutions P1 and P2.
Summary:
The overall most readable and performance-wise fastest solution seems to be 03 with a simple negative lookahead. This is also the fastest solution for JavaScript, since JS does not support the more advanced Regex Features for the other solutions.

Not regex, but I've found it logical and useful to use serial greps with pipe to eliminate noise.
eg. search an apache config file without all the comments-
grep -v '\#' /opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf # this gives all the non-comment lines
and
grep -v '\#' /opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf | grep -i dir
The logic of serial grep's is (not a comment) and (matches dir)

Since no one else has given a direct answer to the question that was asked, I'll do it.
The answer is that with POSIX grep, it's impossible to literally satisfy this request:
grep "<Regex for 'doesn't contain hede'>" input
The reason is that with no flags, POSIX grep is only required to work with Basic Regular Expressions (BREs), which are simply not powerful enough for accomplishing that task, because of lack of alternation in subexpressions. The only kind of alternation it supports involves providing multiple regular expressions separated by newlines, and that doesn't cover all regular languages, e.g. there's no finite collection of BREs that matches the same regular language as the extended regular expression (ERE) ^(ab|cd)*$.
However, GNU grep implements extensions that allow it. In particular, \| is the alternation operator in GNU's implementation of BREs. If your regular expression engine supports alternation, parentheses and the Kleene star, and is able to anchor to the beginning and end of the string, that's all you need for this approach. Note however that negative sets [^ ... ] are very convenient in addition to those, because otherwise, you need to replace them with an expression of the form (a|b|c| ... ) that lists every character that is not in the set, which is extremely tedious and overly long, even more so if the whole character set is Unicode.
Thanks to formal language theory, we get to see how such an expression looks like. With GNU grep, the answer would be something like:
grep "^\([^h]\|h\(h\|eh\|edh\)*\([^eh]\|e[^dh]\|ed[^eh]\)\)*\(\|h\(h\|eh\|edh\)*\(\|e\|ed\)\)$" input
(found with Grail and some further optimizations made by hand).
You can also use a tool that implements EREs, like egrep, to get rid of the backslashes, or equivalently, pass the -E flag to POSIX grep (although I was under the impression that the question required avoiding any flags to grep whatsoever):
egrep "^([^h]|h(h|eh|edh)*([^eh]|e[^dh]|ed[^eh]))*(|h(h|eh|edh)*(|e|ed))$" input
Here's a script to test it (note it generates a file testinput.txt in the current directory). Several of the expressions presented in other answers fail this test.
#!/bin/bash
REGEX="^\([^h]\|h\(h\|eh\|edh\)*\([^eh]\|e[^dh]\|ed[^eh]\)\)*\(\|h\(h\|eh\|edh\)*\(\|e\|ed\)\)$"
# First four lines as in OP's testcase.
cat > testinput.txt <<EOF
hoho
hihi
haha
hede
h
he
ah
head
ahead
ahed
aheda
ahede
hhede
hehede
hedhede
hehehehehehedehehe
hedecidedthat
EOF
diff -s -u <(grep -v hede testinput.txt) <(grep "$REGEX" testinput.txt)
In my system it prints:
Files /dev/fd/63 and /dev/fd/62 are identical
as expected.
For those interested in the details, the technique employed is to convert the regular expression that matches the word into a finite automaton, then invert the automaton by changing every acceptance state to non-acceptance and vice versa, and then converting the resulting FA back to a regular expression.
As everyone has noted, if your regular expression engine supports negative lookahead, the regular expression is much simpler. For example, with GNU grep:
grep -P '^((?!hede).)*$' input
However, this approach has the disadvantage that it requires a backtracking regular expression engine. This makes it unsuitable in installations that are using secure regular expression engines like RE2, which is one reason to prefer the generated approach in some circumstances.
Using Kendall Hopkins' excellent FormalTheory library, written in PHP, which provides a functionality similar to Grail, and a simplifier written by myself, I've been able to write an online generator of negative regular expressions given an input phrase (only alphanumeric and space characters currently supported, and the length is limited): http://www.formauri.es/personal/pgimeno/misc/non-match-regex/
For hede it outputs:
^([^h]|h(h|e(h|dh))*([^eh]|e([^dh]|d[^eh])))*(h(h|e(h|dh))*(ed?)?)?$
which is equivalent to the above.

with this, you avoid to test a lookahead on each positions:
/^(?:[^h]+|h++(?!ede))*+$/
equivalent to (for .net):
^(?>(?:[^h]+|h+(?!ede))*)$
Old answer:
/^(?>[^h]+|h+(?!ede))*$/

Aforementioned (?:(?!hede).)* is great because it can be anchored.
^(?:(?!hede).)*$ # A line without hede
foo(?:(?!hede).)*bar # foo followed by bar, without hede between them
But the following would suffice in this case:
^(?!.*hede) # A line without hede
This simplification is ready to have "AND" clauses added:
^(?!.*hede)(?=.*foo)(?=.*bar) # A line with foo and bar, but without hede
^(?!.*hede)(?=.*foo).*bar # Same

An, in my opinon, more readable variant of the top answer:
^(?!.*hede)
Basically, "match at the beginning of the line if and only if it does not have 'hede' in it" - so the requirement translated almost directly into regex.
Of course, it's possible to have multiple failure requirements:
^(?!.*(hede|hodo|hada))
Details: The ^ anchor ensures the regex engine doesn't retry the match at every location in the string, which would match every string.
The ^ anchor in the beginning is meant to represent the beginning of the line. The grep tool matches each line one at a time, in contexts where you're working with a multiline string, you can use the "m" flag:
/^(?!.*hede)/m # JavaScript syntax
or
(?m)^(?!.*hede) # Inline flag

Here's how I'd do it:
^[^h]*(h(?!ede)[^h]*)*$
Accurate and more efficient than the other answers. It implements Friedl's "unrolling-the-loop" efficiency technique and requires much less backtracking.

Another option is that to add a positive look-ahead and check if hede is anywhere in the input line, then we would negate that, with an expression similar to:
^(?!(?=.*\bhede\b)).*$
with word boundaries.
The expression is explained on the top right panel of regex101.com, if you wish to explore/simplify/modify it, and in this link, you can watch how it would match against some sample inputs, if you like.
RegEx Circuit
jex.im visualizes regular expressions:

If you want to match a character to negate a word similar to negate character class:
For example, a string:
<?
$str="aaa bbb4 aaa bbb7";
?>
Do not use:
<?
preg_match('/aaa[^bbb]+?bbb7/s', $str, $matches);
?>
Use:
<?
preg_match('/aaa(?:(?!bbb).)+?bbb7/s', $str, $matches);
?>
Notice "(?!bbb)." is neither lookbehind nor lookahead, it's lookcurrent, for example:
"(?=abc)abcde", "(?!abc)abcde"

The OP did not specify or Tag the post to indicate the context (programming language, editor, tool) the Regex will be used within.
For me, I sometimes need to do this while editing a file using Textpad.
Textpad supports some Regex, but does not support lookahead or lookbehind, so it takes a few steps.
If I am looking to retain all lines that Do NOT contain the string hede, I would do it like this:
1. Search/replace the entire file to add a unique "Tag" to the beginning of each line containing any text.
Search string:^(.)
Replace string:<##-unique-##>\1
Replace-all
2. Delete all lines that contain the string hede (replacement string is empty):
Search string:<##-unique-##>.*hede.*\n
Replace string:<nothing>
Replace-all
3. At this point, all remaining lines Do NOT contain the string hede. Remove the unique "Tag" from all lines (replacement string is empty):
Search string:<##-unique-##>
Replace string:<nothing>
Replace-all
Now you have the original text with all lines containing the string hede removed.
If I am looking to Do Something Else to only lines that Do NOT contain the string hede, I would do it like this:
1. Search/replace the entire file to add a unique "Tag" to the beginning of each line containing any text.
Search string:^(.)
Replace string:<##-unique-##>\1
Replace-all
2. For all lines that contain the string hede, remove the unique "Tag":
Search string:<##-unique-##>(.*hede)
Replace string:\1
Replace-all
3. At this point, all lines that begin with the unique "Tag", Do NOT contain the string hede. I can now do my Something Else to only those lines.
4. When I am done, I remove the unique "Tag" from all lines (replacement string is empty):
Search string:<##-unique-##>
Replace string:<nothing>
Replace-all

Since the introduction of ruby-2.4.1, we can use the new Absent Operator in Ruby’s Regular Expressions
from the official doc
(?~abc) matches: "", "ab", "aab", "cccc", etc.
It doesn't match: "abc", "aabc", "ccccabc", etc.
Thus, in your case ^(?~hede)$ does the job for you
2.4.1 :016 > ["hoho", "hihi", "haha", "hede"].select{|s| /^(?~hede)$/.match(s)}
=> ["hoho", "hihi", "haha"]

Through PCRE verb (*SKIP)(*F)
^hede$(*SKIP)(*F)|^.*$
This would completely skips the line which contains the exact string hede and matches all the remaining lines.
DEMO
Execution of the parts:
Let us consider the above regex by splitting it into two parts.
Part before the | symbol. Part shouldn't be matched.
^hede$(*SKIP)(*F)
Part after the | symbol. Part should be matched.
^.*$
PART 1
Regex engine will start its execution from the first part.
^hede$(*SKIP)(*F)
Explanation:
^ Asserts that we are at the start.
hede Matches the string hede
$ Asserts that we are at the line end.
So the line which contains the string hede would be matched. Once the regex engine sees the following (*SKIP)(*F) (Note: You could write (*F) as (*FAIL)) verb, it skips and make the match to fail. | called alteration or logical OR operator added next to the PCRE verb which inturn matches all the boundaries exists between each and every character on all the lines except the line contains the exact string hede. See the demo here. That is, it tries to match the characters from the remaining string. Now the regex in the second part would be executed.
PART 2
^.*$
Explanation:
^ Asserts that we are at the start. ie, it matches all the line starts except the one in the hede line. See the demo here.
.* In the Multiline mode, . would match any character except newline or carriage return characters. And * would repeat the previous character zero or more times. So .* would match the whole line. See the demo here.
Hey why you added .* instead of .+ ?
Because .* would match a blank line but .+ won't match a blank. We want to match all the lines except hede , there may be a possibility of blank lines also in the input . so you must use .* instead of .+ . .+ would repeat the previous character one or more times. See .* matches a blank line here.
$ End of the line anchor is not necessary here.

The TXR Language supports regex negation.
$ txr -c '#(repeat)
#{nothede /~hede/}
#(do (put-line nothede))
#(end)' Input
A more complicated example: match all lines that start with a and end with z, but do not contain the substring hede:
$ txr -c '#(repeat)
#{nothede /a.*z&~.*hede.*/}
#(do (put-line nothede))
#(end)' -
az <- echoed
az
abcz <- echoed
abcz
abhederz <- not echoed; contains hede
ahedez <- not echoed; contains hede
ace <- not echoed; does not end in z
ahedz <- echoed
ahedz
Regex negation is not particularly useful on its own but when you also have intersection, things get interesting, since you have a full set of boolean set operations: you can express "the set which matches this, except for things which match that".

It may be more maintainable to two regexes in your code, one to do the first match, and then if it matches run the second regex to check for outlier cases you wish to block for example ^.*(hede).* then have appropriate logic in your code.
OK, I admit this is not really an answer to the posted question posted and it may also use slightly more processing than a single regex. But for developers who came here looking for a fast emergency fix for an outlier case then this solution should not be overlooked.

The below function will help you get your desired output
<?PHP
function removePrepositions($text){
$propositions=array('/\bfor\b/i','/\bthe\b/i');
if( count($propositions) > 0 ) {
foreach($propositions as $exceptionPhrase) {
$text = preg_replace($exceptionPhrase, '', trim($text));
}
$retval = trim($text);
}
return $retval;
}
?>

I wanted to add another example for if you are trying to match an entire line that contains string X, but does not also contain string Y.
For example, let's say we want to check if our URL / string contains "tasty-treats", so long as it does not also contain "chocolate" anywhere.
This regex pattern would work (works in JavaScript too)
^(?=.*?tasty-treats)((?!chocolate).)*$
(global, multiline flags in example)
Interactive Example: https://regexr.com/53gv4
Matches
(These urls contain "tasty-treats" and also do not contain "chocolate")
example.com/tasty-treats/strawberry-ice-cream
example.com/desserts/tasty-treats/banana-pudding
example.com/tasty-treats-overview
Does Not Match
(These urls contain "chocolate" somewhere - so they won't match even though they contain "tasty-treats")
example.com/tasty-treats/chocolate-cake
example.com/home-cooking/oven-roasted-chicken
example.com/tasty-treats/banana-chocolate-fudge
example.com/desserts/chocolate/tasty-treats
example.com/chocolate/tasty-treats/desserts

As long as you are dealing with lines, simply mark the negative matches and target the rest.
In fact, I use this trick with sed because ^((?!hede).)*$ looks not supported by it.
For the desired output
Mark the negative match: (e.g. lines with hede), using a character not included in the whole text at all. An emoji could probably be a good choice for this purpose.
s/(.*hede)/🔒\1/g
Target the rest (the unmarked strings: e.g. lines without hede). Suppose you want to keep only the target and delete the rest (as you want):
s/^🔒.*//g
For a better understanding
Suppose you want to delete the target:
Mark the negative match: (e.g. lines with hede), using a character not included in the whole text at all. An emoji could probably be a good choice for this purpose.
s/(.*hede)/🔒\1/g
Target the rest (the unmarked strings: e.g. lines without hede). Suppose you want to delete the target:
s/^[^🔒].*//g
Remove the mark:
s/🔒//g

^((?!hede).)*$ is an elegant solution, except since it consumes characters you won't be able to combine it with other criteria. For instance, say you wanted to check for the non-presence of "hede" and the presence of "haha." This solution would work because it won't consume characters:
^(?!.*\bhede\b)(?=.*\bhaha\b)

How to use PCRE's backtracking control verbs to match a line not containing a word
Here's a method that I haven't seen used before:
/.*hede(*COMMIT)^|/
How it works
First, it tries to find "hede" somewhere in the line. If successful, at this point, (*COMMIT) tells the engine to, not only not backtrack in the event of a failure, but also not to attempt any further matching in that case. Then, we try to match something that cannot possibly match (in this case, ^).
If a line does not contain "hede" then the second alternative, an empty subpattern, successfully matches the subject string.
This method is no more efficient than a negative lookahead, but I figured I'd just throw it on here in case someone finds it nifty and finds a use for it for other, more interesting applications.

Simplest thing that I could find would be
[^(hede)]
Tested at https://regex101.com/
You can also add unit-test cases on that site

A simpler solution is to use the not operator !
Your if statement will need to match "contains" and not match "excludes".
var contains = /abc/;
var excludes =/hede/;
if(string.match(contains) && !(string.match(excludes))){ //proceed...
I believe the designers of RegEx anticipated the use of not operators.

Python Regex Behaviour

I'm trying to parse a text document with data in the following format: 24036 -977. I need to separate the numbers into separate values, and the way I've done that is with the following steps.
values = re.search("(.*?)\s(.*)")
x = values.group(1)
y = values.gropu(2)
This does the job, however I was curious about why using (.*?) in the second group causes the regex to fail? I tested it in the online regex tester(https://regex101.com/r/bM2nK1/1), and adding the ? in causes the second group to return nothing. Now as far as I know .*? means to take any value unlimited times, as few times as possible, and the .* is just the greedy version of that. What I'm confused about is why the non greedy version.*? takes that definition to mean capturing nothing?

Because it means to match the previous token, the *, as few times as possible, which is 0 times. If you would it to extend to the end of the string, add a $, which matches the end of string. If you would like it to match at least one, use + instead of *.
The reason the first group .*? matches 24036 is because you have the \s token after it, so the fewest amount of characters the .*? could match and be followed by a \s is 24036.

#iobender has pointed out the answer to your question.
But I think it's worth mentioning that if the numbers are separated by space, you can just use split:
>>> '24036 -977'.split()
['24036', '-977']
This is simpler, easier to understand and often faster than regex.

Trying to find all instances of a keyword NOT in comments or literals?

I'm trying to find all instances of the keyword "public" in some Java code (with a Python script) that are not in comments or strings, a.k.a. not found following //, in between a /* and a */, and not in between double or single quotes, and which are not part of variable names-- i.e. they must be preceded by a space, tab, or newline, and must be followed by the same.
So here's what I have at the moment--
//.*\spublic\s.*\n
/\*.*\spublic\s.*\*/
".*\spublic\s.*"
'.*\spublic\s.*'
Am I messing this up at all?
But that finds exactly what I'm NOT looking for. How can I turn it around and search the inverse of the sum of those four expressions, as a single regex?
I've figured out this probably uses negative look-ahead and look-behind, but I still can't quite piece it together. Also, for the /**/ regex, I'm concerned that .* doesn't match newlines, so it would fail to recognize that this public is in a comment:
/*
public
*/
Everything below this point is me thinking on paper and can be disregarded. These thoughts are not fully accurate.
Edit:
I daresay (?<!//).*public.* would match anything not in single line comments, so I'm getting the hang of things. I think. But still unsure how to combine everything.
Edit2:
So then-- following that idea, I |ed them all to get--
(?<!//).*public.*|(?<!/\*).*public.\*/(?!\*/)|(?<!").*public.*(?!")|(?<!').*public.*(?!')
But I'm not sure about that. //public will not be matched by the first alternate, but it will be matched by the second. I need to AND the look-aheads and look-behinds, not OR the whole thing.

I'm sorry, but I'll have to break the news to you, that what you are trying to do is impossible. The reason is mostly because Java is not a regular language. As we all know by now, most regex engines provide non-regular features, but Python in particular is lacking something like recursion (PCRE) or balancing groups (.NET) which could do the trick. But let's look into that in more depth.
First of all, why are your patterns not as good as you think they are? (for the task of matching public inside those literals; similar problems will apply to reversing the logic)
As you have already recognized, you will have problems with line breaks (in the case of /*...*/). This can be solved by either using the modifier/option/flag re.S (which changes the behavior of .) or by using [\s\S] instead of . (because the former matches any character).
But there are other problems. You only want to find surrounding occurrences of the string or comment literals. You are not actually making sure that they are specifically wrapped around the public in question. I'm not sure how much you can put onto a single line in Java, but if you had an arbitrary string, then later a public and then another string on a single line, then your regex would match the public because it can find the " before and after it. Even if that is not possible, if you have two block comments in the same input, then any public between those two block comments would cause a match. So you would need to find a way to assert only that your public is really inside "..." or /*...*/ and not just that these literals can be found anywhere to left of right of it.
Next thing: matches cannot overlap. But your match includes everything from the opening literal until the ending literal. So if you had "public public" that would cause only one match. And capturing cannot help you here. Usually the trick to avoid this is to use lookarounds (which are not included in the match). But (as we will see later) the lookbehind doesn't work as nicely as you would think, because it cannot be of arbitrary length (only in .NET that is possible).
Now the worst of all. What if you have " inside a comment? That shouldn't count, right? What if you have // or /* or */ inside a string? That shouldn't count, right? What about ' inside "-strings and " inside '-strings? Even worse, what about \" inside "-string? So for 100% robustness you would have to do a similar check for your surrounding delimiters as well. And this is usually where regular expressions reach the end of their capabilities and this is why you need a proper parser that walks the input string and builds a whole tree of your code.
But say you never have comment literals inside strings and you never have quotes inside comments (or only matched quotes, because they would constitute a string, and we don't want public inside strings anyway). So we are basically assuming that every of the literals in question is correctly matched, and they are never nested. In that case you can use a lookahead to check whether you are inside or outside one of the literals (in fact, multiple lookaheads). I'll get to that shortly.
But there is one more thing left. What does (?<!//).*public.* not work? For this to match it is enough for (?<!//) to match at any single position. e.g. if you just had input // public the engine would try out the negative lookbehind right at the start of the string, (to the left of the start of the string), would find no //, then use .* to consume // and the space and then match public. What you actually want is (?<!//.*)public. This will start the lookbehind from the starting position of public and look all the way to the left through the current line. But... this is a variable-length lookbehind, which is only supported by .NET.
But let's look into how we can make sure we are really outside of a string. We can use a lookahead to look all the way to the end of the input, and check that there is an even number of quotes on the way.
public(?=[^"]*("[^"]*"[^"]*)*$)
Now if we try really hard we can also ignore escaped quotes when inside of a string:
public(?=[^"]*("(?:[^"\\]|\\.)*"[^"]*)*$)
So once we encounter a " we will accept either non-quote, non-backslash characters, or a backslash character and whatever follows it (that allows escaping of backslash-characters as well, so that in "a string\\" we won't treat the closing " as being escaped). We can use this with multi-line mode (re.M) to avoid going all the way to the end of the input (because the end of the line is enough):
public(?=[^"\r\n]*("(?:[^"\r\n\\]|\\.)*"[^"\r\n]*)*$)
(re.M is implied for all following patterns)
This is what it looks for single-quoted strings:
public(?=[^'\r\n]*('(?:[^'\r\n\\]|\\.)*'[^'\r\n]*)*$)
For block comments it's a bit easier, because we only need to look for /* or the end of the string (this time really the end of the entire string), without ever encountering */ on the way. That is done with a negative lookahead at every single position until the end of the search:
public(?=(?:(?![*]/)[\s\S])*(?:/[*]|\Z))
But as I said, we're stumped on the single-line comments for now. But anyway, we can combine the last three regular expressions into one, because lookaheads don't actually advance the position of the regex engine on the target string:
public(?=[^"\r\n]*("(?:[^"\r\n\\]|\\.)*"[^"\r\n]*)*$)(?=[^'\r\n]*('(?:[^'\r\n\\]|\\.)*'[^'\r\n]*)*$)(?=(?:(?![*]/)[\s\S])*(?:/[*]|\Z))
Now what about those single-line comments? The trick to emulate variable-length lookbehinds is usually to reverse the string and the pattern - which makes the lookbehind a lookahead:
cilbup(?!.*//)
Of course, that means we have to reverse all other patterns, too. The good news is, if we don't care about escaping, they look exactly the same (because both quotes and block comments are symmetrical). So you could run this pattern on a reversed input:
cilbup(?=[^"\r\n]*("[^"\r\n]*"[^"\r\n]*)*$)(?=[^'\r\n]*('[^'\r\n]*'[^'\r\n]*)*$)(?=(?:(?![*]/)[\s\S])*(?:/[*]|\Z))(?!.*//)
You can then find the match positions in your actual input by using inputLength -foundMatchPosition - foundMatchLength.
Now what about escaping? That get's quite annoying now, because we have to skip quotes, if they are followed by a backslash. Because of some backtracking issues we need to take care of that in five places. Three times, when consuming non-quote characters (because we need to allow "\ as well now. And twice, when consuming quote characters (using a negative lookahead to make sure there is no backslash after them). Let's look at double quotes:
cilbup(?=(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*(?:"(?!\\)(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*"(?!\\)(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*)*$)
(It looks horrible, but if you compare it with the pattern that disregards escaping, you will notice the few differences.)
So incorporating that into the above pattern:
cilbup(?=(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*(?:"(?!\\)(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*"(?!\\)(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*)*$)(?=(?:[^'\r\n]|'\\)*(?:'(?!\\)(?:[^'\r\n]|'\\)*'(?!\\)(?:[^'\r\n]|'\\)*)*$)(?=(?:(?![*]/)[\s\S])*(?:/[*]|\Z))(?!.*//)
So this might actually do it for many cases. But as you can see it's horrible, almost impossible to read, and definitely impossible to maintain.
What were the caveats? No comment literals inside strings, no string literals inside strings of the other type, no string literals inside comments. Plus, we have four independent lookaheads, which will probably take some time (at least I think I have a voided most of backtracking).
In any case, I believe this is as close as you can get with regular expressions.
EDIT:
I just realised I forgot the condition that public must not be part of a longer literal. You included spaces, but what if it's the first thing in the input? The easiest thing would be to use \b. That matches a position (without including surrounding characters) that is between a word character and a non-word character. However, Java identifiers may contain any Unicode letter or digit, and I'm not sure whether Python's \b is Unicode-aware. Also, Java identifiers may contain $. Which would break that anyway. Lookarounds to the rescue! Instead of asserting that there is a space character on every side, let's assert that there is no non-space character. Because we need negative lookarounds for that, we will get the advantage of not including those characters in the match for free:
(?<!\S)cilbup(?!\S)(?=(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*(?:"(?!\\)(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*"(?!\\)(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*)*$)(?=(?:[^'\r\n]|'\\)*(?:'(?!\\)(?:[^'\r\n]|'\\)*'(?!\\)(?:[^'\r\n]|'\\)*)*$)(?=(?:(?![*]/)[\s\S])*(?:/[*]|\Z))(?!.*//)
And because just from scrolling this code snippet to the right one cannot quite grasp how ridiculously huge this regex is, here it is in freespacing mode (re.X) with some annotations:
(?<!\S) # make sure there is no trailing non-whitespace character
cilbup # public
(?!\S) # make sure there is no leading non-whitespace character
(?= # lookahead (effectively lookbehind!) to ensure we are not inside a
# string
(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*
# consume everything except for line breaks and quotes, unless the
# quote is followed by a backslash (preceded in the actual input)
(?: # subpattern that matches two (unescaped) quotes
"(?!\\) # a quote that is not followed by a backslash
(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*
# we've seen that before
"(?!\\) # a quote that is not followed by a backslash
(?:[^"\r\n]|"\\)*
# we've seen that before
)* # end of subpattern - repeat 0 or more times (ensures even no. of ")
$ # end of line (start of line in actual input)
) # end of double-quote lookahead
(?=(?:[^'\r\n]|'\\)*(?:'(?!\\)(?:[^'\r\n]|'\\)*'(?!\\)(?:[^'\r\n]|'\\)*)*$)
# the same horrible bastard again for single quotes
(?= # lookahead (effectively lookbehind) for block comments
(?: # subgroup to consume anything except */
(?![*]/) # make sure there is no */ coming up
[\s\S] # consume an arbitrary character
)* # repeat
(?:/[*]|\Z)# require to find either /* or the end of the string
) # end of lookahead for block comments
(?!.*//) # make sure there is no // on this line

Have you considered replacing all comments and single and double quoted string literals with null strings using the re sub() method. Then just do a simple search/match/find of the resulting file for the word you're looking for?
That would at least give you the line numbers where the word is located. You may be able to use that information to edit the original file.

You could use pyparsing to find public keyword outside a comment or a double quoted string:
from pyparsing import Keyword, javaStyleComment, dblQuotedString
keyword = "public"
expr = Keyword(keyword).ignore(javaStyleComment | dblQuotedString)
Example
for [token], start, end in expr.scanString(r"""{keyword} should match
/*
{keyword} should not match "
*/
// this {keyword} also shouldn't match
"neither this \" {keyword}"
but this {keyword} will
re{keyword} is ignored
'{keyword}' - also match (only double quoted strings are ignored)
""".format(keyword=keyword)):
assert token == keyword and len(keyword) == (end - start)
print("Found at %d" % start)
Output
Found at 0
Found at 146
Found at 187
To ignore also single quoted string, you could use quotedString instead of dblQuotedString.
To do it with only regexes, see regex-negation tag on SO e.g., Regular expression to match string not containing a word? or using even less regex capabilities Regex: Matching by exclusion, without look-ahead - is it possible?. The simple way would be to use a positive match and skip matched comments, quoted strings. The result is the rest of the matches.

It's finding the opposite because that's just what you're asking for. :)
I don't know a way to match them all in a single regex (though it should be theoretically possible, since the regular languages are closed under complements and intersections). But you could definitely search for all instances of public, and then remove any instances that are matched by one of your "bad" regexes. Try using for example set.difference on the match.start and match.end properties from re.finditer.