How can I match a greedily quantified string of non-'[' characters which doesn't contain the string '->' anywhere inside it?

Question

This is sort of a starting point, although I don't think it actually covers the scenario, or if it does, it's confusing me too much for me to wrap my head around how to apply it to what I need. I wouldn't know whether to use . or ..... and then I'm not sure how I would achieve the greedy, imprecise quantification.

Regexes make my head spin...

Answer 1

Try this:

((?!->)[^\]])+

The pattern first looks ahead to check that there's no "->" (the (?!->) part), and then matches any char other than a "]". This is then repeated once or more.

You may want to "anchor" your pattern to validate the entire input string:

^((?!->)[^\]])+$