Hello,

I need to create a regular expression to match a specific substring but ignore another substring. For example, I want to match a sentence containing the word "myMessage" as long as the sentence doesn't have the word "ignored". Here is an example sentence:
1) Dump: myMessage is to be picked
2) Dump: myMessage is to be ignored

In this case, 1) should be matched and 2) should be ignored. Is this possible with regular expression?

cat file | grep -v ignored | grep myMessage ?

regular expressions are tricky when it comes to conditions and iterations. Generally w3bd3vil's solution works unless you're trying to do something as part of a program. In a program (I think) you need to split it in two statements.

You could do it ugly way:
But please notice that this regexp assumes that "picked" is at the end of line and it is not elegant solution. Also notice that "[^i][^g][^n][^o][^r][^e][^d]" can't be used alone (without "|picked)" part) to filter out "ignored" words, because it will also remove words like "index", etc. - i.e. those that have at least one letter in common with "ignored".

The less-uggly way will be:
But it will remove any 7-letter word that contains letters from "ignored", and it doesn't precisely remove "ignored".

It looks like grep doesn't have elegant NOT operation when it comes words. You can exclude letters from certain character set, you can search for word OR another word ( egrep 'myMessage.*(picked|ignored)"will match lines with picked or ignored, but nothing else), but there is no operator for excluding word or pattern.

Hello,
Thanks w3bd3vil. Grep actually wouldn't work because this regex is supposed to into another program and is not meant to run in the command.

As for the following, I actually do need a few words (ie a substring) to be matched exactly the way it is. So I guess the carat operator on individual characters, or the character set, won't work.
[QUOTE=ErV;3347578]I guess I should have been a bit clearer:
1) Dump: myMessage is ....
2) Dump: myMessage is to be not picked as it's not understood

where "...." can be anything but "to be not picked as it's not understood". Something along this direction. Any way this can be done using regex? Thanks.