Regular expression negative lookahead

A negative lookahead says, at this position, the following regex can not match.

Let’s take a simplified example:

a(?!b(?!c))

a      Match: (?!b) succeeds
ac     Match: (?!b) succeeds
ab     No match: (?!b(?!c)) fails
abe    No match: (?!b(?!c)) fails
abc    Match: (?!b(?!c)) succeeds

The last example is a double negation: it allows b followed by c. The nested negative lookahead becomes a positive lookahead: the c should be present.

In each example, only the a is matched. The lookahead is only a condition, and does not add to the matched text.

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