Regular expression help

m_stan

Hi - Can someone please give me a regular expression for the following:

Matches strings which start with

My name is Mark

but do not include

and I live in Dublin

jessy

what language are you using? have you made an attempt at this already?

koloughlin

Here's a perl regex that I think does this

/^My name is Mark(?!.*and I live in Dublin)/

m_stan

I'm actually just doing a big find and replace in Dreamweaver on an XML file.

What I ideally need to do is replace any of the following

My name is Mark and I am Irish and have blue eyes
My name is Mark and I am male and have size 10 feet
My name is Mark and I am tired and want to sleep

with

My name is Mark and I live in Dublin (followed by the rest of the original string after the 'Mark')

Does that make sense ? Any help very much appreciated. This file is big with over 3000 matches to replace so I want to avoid doing this by hand.

koloughlin

Ok, then this will probably do that in perl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

while(<>) {
   s/^My name is Mark(?!.*and I live in Dublin)/My name is Mark and I live in Dublin/; {
      print;
   }
}

jessy

so your not trying to develope an application or anything, you just want to save some time in updating an xml file which cantains a large amount of text? a once off update?

m_stan

Gottit ! Thanks for your help. Very relieved not to have to do all this manually !!!