Negating an entire string in a regex

[linus]

Here's my problem: I'm trying to match any image tag whose URI isn't absolute (i.e. doesn't begin with http://).

<img src="[^http://]

That won't work the way I want: it doesn't negate the string 'http://;' it negates either an h, t, p, :, or /. I thought this might work:

<img src="[^(http://)]

...but paretheses are taken literally inside brackets, so that won't do what I want either.

Any ideas? Thanks for your time...

[ThreeDee]

Bump

[bobthedog]

Unfortunately I am still getting to grips with the complexities of regular expressions, but I had the same issue.

Instead of trying to match the whole thing, I broke the expression down a bit more to find what differentiated between an [url]http://[/url] requested image and a relative image.

I concluded that you may as well just try to not match on ":", so instead of [^http] then try [^:]. This should work, since : is not allowed as part of the path apart from in the [url]http://[/url] or in the port specification of the server i.e. [url]www.google.com:80.[/url]

Wither way, it will only be used if specifying the server name, so I think it would be a valid match.

[ThreeDee]

Good point, thanks. I thought about this, but decided I wanted a more definite solution, so I'm using a looping string search to make replacements manually.