How to match “anything up until this sequence of characters” in a regular expression?

Question

Take this regular expression: /^[^abc]/. This will match any single character at the beginning of a string, except a, b, or c.

If you add a *

Answer 1

What you need is look around assertion like .+? (?=abc).

See: Lookahead and Lookbehind Zero-Length Assertions

Be aware that [abc] isn't the same as abc. Inside brackets it's not a string - each character is just one of the possibilities. Outside the brackets it becomes the string.