Reg Expression prob PHP overlooked! help

[Anon]

I know that, for example, to say "not a" in regex its [^a], but what happens if I need to do more than just one character, for example, "not http://"? [^http://] cannot be done. Don't tell me PHP has overlooked this fact. Please help...

[Anon]

I was going to answer this with Perl-style regexps using lookbehind assertions and said:

(?<!http:\/\/)

noting that forward slashes need to be escaped, but then I settled on the more straightforward

[^{h][t][t][p][:][/][/]}

"Not an h, followed by not a t, followed by not a t..."

which shows that even real regexps are up to the task, as well as POSIX-style ereg ones and Perl-style preg ones. (Would you believe that real regular expressions can't do back references?)

[Anon]

No that second one's not right. Stick with the preg_* one.