string - Regex not operator

Question

Is there an NOT operator in Regexes? Like in that string : "(2001) (asdf) (dasd1123_asd 21.01.2011 zqge)(dzqge) name (20019)"

I want to delete all ([0-9a-zA-z _.-:]*) but not the one where it is a year: (2001).

So what the regex should return must be: (2001) name.

NOTE: something like ((?![d]){4}[0-9a-zA-z _.-:]*) does not work for me (the (20019) somehow also matches...)

Answer 1

Not quite, although generally you can usually use some workaround on one of the forms

• [^abc], which is character by character not a or b or c,
• or negative lookahead: a(?!b), which is a not followed by b
• or negative lookbehind: (?<!a)b, which is b not preceeded by a