Regex match a character that's not part of word in string

Question

Using Regex in JS I'm trying to match all < and > which are not part of a specific HTML element. In the below example, I try to exclude those associated with ^and but my current expression still matches with > at the end of the element.

How can I also exclude the ending > of the element?

Current expression:

 /(?!<\/?sup>)[<>]/gi

Answer 1

Almost there; the special tag can show up before or after a tag, eg using ( Demo ):

(?<!sup)[<>](?!\/?sup)

Or if you want to make it more readable: <(??\/?sup)|(?<!\/?sup)> We could optimize this with possessive quantifiers; unfortunately, JS does not support them.