I wonder why none of the people responded to this post actually read the post carefully. They all come up with solutions that use two regexes. What's so hard to understand about:
I'm actually reading the pattern from a configuration file. Everything outside of the slashes is not changeable.

You have a misunderstanding about the meaning of [ ] inside a regular expression. [ ] is a character class, and matches exactly one character. Inside you either list the characters that are allowed to match, or the characters that aren't allowed to match. [^(H\-000)(IF\-000)] means the same as [^(H\-0)IF] and means "match a single character, the character could be anything, except a (, an H, a dash, a 0, a ), an I or an F.

If I understand your requirements, you are looking for all files that start with PH, and do not end with either "H-000" or "I-000". The following regex ought to work: 

    /^PH(?:.{0,4}|.*(?![HI]-000).{5})$/

[download]
It works with 5.004_02.

Abigail

In reply to Re: old Perl regex problem by Abigail-II
in thread old Perl regex problem by GhodMode

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