How can I match strings that don't match a particular pattern in Perl?

Question

I know that it is easy to match anything except a given character using a regular expression.

$text = \"ab ac ad\";
$text =~ s/[^c]*//g; # Match anything, except         


        

Answer 1

If you just want to check if the string does not contain "ac", just use a negation.

$text = "ab ac ad";

print "ac not found" if $text !~ /ac/;

or

print "ac not found" unless $text =~ /ac/;