Regex: grouping characters

[Anon]

I have (or rather, am trying to create) a pattern to match anything that's not two <br />'s:

[^(<br /><br />)]+

However, instead it matches anything that's not <, or b, or r, etc... every letter individually, even though I have the parathensis around them. Any ideas? Thankee..

[sjokki]

As far as I know you can't do that with the ereg-functions. With the preg-functions you can do it like this.

([^<]|<(?!br /><br />))+

In words this is: antything that is not '<'. Or '<' but not followed by 'br /><br />'.

[Anon]

Well, you can, with ereg functions, but it involves exponentially long regexps...