Is there a way to do negative lookahead in vim regex?
regex, regex-lookarounds, vim
Solution
The `.*` allows an arbitrary distance between the match and the non-match, which is asserted later. You need to pull the `.*` into the negative look-ahead:
/abc\(.*xyz\)\@!
Possible Reason The non-match is attempted for all possible matches of `.*`, and the `\@!` is declared as fulfilled only when all branches have been tried.
Problem
In Vim, is there a way to search for lines that match say `abc` but do not also contain `xyz` later on the line? So the following lines would match: ``` The abc is the best The first three letters are abc ``` and the following would not match: ``` The abc is the best but xyz is cheaper The first three letters are abc and the last are xyz ``` I know about syntax like the following: ``` /abc\(xyz\)\@! ``` but that only avoids matching `abcxyz` and not if there is anything in between, such as `abc-xyz`. Using ``` /abc.*\(xyz\)\@! ``` also does not work because there are many positions later in the line where `xyz` is not matched. (I should note that on the command line I would do something like `grep abc <infile | grep -v xyz` but I would like to do the above interactively in Vim.)