While the sexeger solution which I popularized a few years ago is a good solution for this, it's probably overkill. Either do as shown above: /^[^?]*whatever/, or use a technique that is extensible for when the "?" thing is more than just one character in length: /^(?!.*XXX.*$pattern).*$pattern/. That will match $pattern that is not preceded by XXX.
Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

In reply to Re: negative lookbehind question by japhy
in thread negative lookbehind question by shadowpuppet

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