Re: (another) regex difficulty

Cristian Lavaque wrote: > Jonas_weber @ Gmx . Ch wrote: >> regular expressions >> the example below should turn any character exept "\*" (*= any char) >> into an "x": >> >> $term = preg_replace('/[^(\\\)+(.){1}]/', 'x', $term); >> >> but i guess because of the [brackets] the "." (period) is treated as >> character "." instead as metacharacter (that matches any char). > > I'm new to regex too, but if you want to match anything that's not an > *, couldn't it be done like this? > > $term = preg_replace('/[^\*\s]*/', 'x', $term); > > I put the \s there to skip the whitespace characters too. I haven't > tested, but I hope it helps. > > Cristian doh, I now understand your question, you don't mean the asterisk literally, but as any character that follows a backslash... sorry -_- In a character class, you can negate that class by starting it with ^, but how do you negate something that's not a class? in this case "\\.", cause if it's in a charactar class, it'll match "\n" or "n\\\\\\". Is there a simple way to negate a string with regular expression? I hope I wasn't too confusing in my question. Cristian