I have a feeling this will get closed as a duplicate as it seems like this would be a common ask...but in my defense, I have searched SO as well as Google and could not find anything.

I'm trying to search SQL files using ripgrep, but I want to exclude matches that are part of a single line SQL comment.

• I do not need to worry about multi-line /* foobar */ comments. Only single line -- foobar
• I do not need to capture anything
• I don't need to worry about the possiblity of the string being part of text, like SELECT '-- foobar' or SELECT '--', foobar. I'm okay with those false exclusions.

Match examples:

• Match: SELECT foobar
• Match: , foobar
• Exclude: SELECT baz -- foobar
• Exclude: -- foobar
• Exclude: ---foobar
• Exclude: -- blah foobar blah

AKA, search for foobar but ignore the match if -- occurs at any point before it on that line.

I have tried things like negative lookbehinds and other methods, but I can't seem to get them to work.

This answer seemed like it would get me there: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13873003/3474677

That answer says to use (?<!grad\()vec to find matches of vec that are not prefaced with grad(. So if I translate that to my use case, I would get (?<!--)foobar. This works...but only for excluding lines that contain --foobar it does not handle the other scenarios.

Worst case scenario, I can just pipe the results from ripgrep into another filter and exclude lines that match --.*foobar but I'm hoping to find an all-in-one solution.

CodePudding user response：

According to the comments, using ripgrep and enable --pcre2 you can use:

^(?:(?!--).)*\bfoobar\b

• ^ Start of string
• (?: Non capture group
  • (?!--). Negative lookahead, assert the from the current position there is not -- directly to the right. If that assertion is true, then match any character except a newline
• )* Close the non capture group and optionally repeat it
• \bfoobar\b Match the word foobar

See a regex demo.