(?!bar) is a negative lookahead assertion. It is zero width assertion, so it anchors the match but doesn't use any characters. (?!bar). matches a character which is not the start of a bar sequence.

So, with that in mind: ((?!bar).){1,5} matches as many characters as it can (up to 5, and at least 1) that is not the start of the character sequence bar.

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re: Why isn't this regex greedy? by GrandFather
in thread Why isn't this regex greedy? by Melly

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