A little more background on the domain of this problem:

I've written a tool (in Perl) for transforming data on enterprise applications (modules & relations) to an input format for graphic display (nodes & arcs).

The node names have the general format:

[A-Z]{2}\d{5}[A-Z]?
[download]

Part of the tool allows you to enter a regex (in a textbox), the program compiles the regex and uses it as a filter to parse the data (eg. discard data line if node-name !~ node-filter).

For instance you can specify the following regex:

(CX36(5|6))|(JA30[0-2])|(JA3(([2-8]\d)|(9[0-4])))|(JA5.*)|(JA6((0\d)|(
+1[0-3])))|(JA64[7-9])|(JA687.*)|(JA74[0-3])|(JB5.*)|(JY(((1|2)\d\d)|(
+3[0-3]\d)))|(JY[3-9][5-9]\d)|(JZ51(3|4)00.*)
[download]

to indicate that you're only interested in source modules matching the following name conventions (which is an example of an actual application domain) :

CX365-CX366
JA300-JA302
JA320-JA394
JA5*
JA600-JA613
JA647-JA649
JA687*
JA740-JA743
JB5*
JY100-JY339
JY350-JY999
JZ51300*
JZ51400*
[download]

Now it's also often relevant to filter on nodes NOT matching a given application domain (in effect the complement of the domain definition), - for the above example all modules which pass a filter combining the following regex'es:

^(?!CX36(5|6))
^(?!JA30[0-2])
^(?!JA3(([2-8]\d)|(9[0-4])))
^(?!JA5.*)
^(?!(JA6((0\d)|(1[0-3]))))
^(?!JA64[7-9])
^(?!JA687.*)
^(?!JA74[0-3])
^(?!JB5.*)
^(?!(JY(((1|2)\d\d)|(3[0-3]\d))))
^(?!JY[3-9][5-9]\d)
^(?!JZ51(3|4)00.*)
[download]

Thus the need to combine (AND) the "negated" rexeg'es into one big regx and pass that to the parsing/filtering program.

Allan

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