Match words that don't start with a certain letter using regex

Question

I am learning regex but have not been able to find the right regex in python for selecting characters that start with a particular alphabet.

Example below

text='this is a test'
match=re.findall('(?!t)\w*',text)

# match returns
['his', '', 'is', '', 'a', '', 'est', '']

match=re.findall('[^t]\w+',text)

# match
['his', ' is', ' a', ' test']

Expected : ['is','a']

Answer 1

With regex

Use the negative set [^\\Wt] to match any alphanumeric character that is not t . To avoid matching subsets of words, add the word boundary metacharacter, \\b , at the beginning of your pattern.

Also, do not forget that you should use raw strings for regex patterns.

import re

text = 'this is a test'
match = re.findall(r'\b[^\Wt]\w*', text)

print(match) # prints: ['is', 'a']

See the demo here .

Without regex

Note that this is also achievable without regex.

text = 'this is a test'
match = [word for word in text.split() if not word.startswith('t')]

print(match) # prints: ['is', 'a']

Answer 2

You are almost on the right track. You just forgot \\b (word boundary) token:

\b(?!t)\w+

Live demo