RegExp matching string not starting with my

Question

For PMD I\'d like to have a rule which warns me of those ugly variables which start with my.
This means I have to accept all variables which do NO

Answer 1

^(?!my)\w+$

should work.

It first ensures that it's not possible to match my at the start of the string, and then matches alphanumeric characters until the end of the string. Whitespace anywhere in the string will cause the regex to fail. Depending on your input you might want to either strip whitespace in the front and back of the string before passing it to the regex, or use add optional whitespace matchers to the regex like ^\s*(?!my)(\w+)\s*$. In this case, backreference 1 will contain the name of the variable.

And if you need to ensure that your variable name starts with a certain group of characters, say [A-Za-z_], use

^(?!my)[A-Za-z_]\w*$

Note the change from + to *.