This seems like it wouldn't be too difficult, but I am having lots of problems. I am using ASP.NET I have a form with a list of states using their two letter abbreviation. I have a regular expression validator and I would like for it to fail if the person chooses ME or WV from the list. I have have tried several expressions in Expresso and none seem to return the desired results.

I tried [^ME]* but that excludes anything which contains M or E but I want it to only exclude items which contain both M and E.  

 

 

^(?!ME|WV)[A-Z]{2}$

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I tried the above reg ex ^(?!ME|WV)[A-Z]{2}$  in expresso. I had the sample text of

ME
AK
MS
DE
WV

However nothing is returned. I am not sure if I am doing somethig wrong or if there is an issue with the regex.

 

I also tried the above regex at   using the above sample and no matches were returned.

^(?!ME|WV)[A-Z]{2}$  would match these strings individually:

"AK"

"MS"

"DE"

But it won't match the input you attempted since your text looks like this to a regex operation:

^ME\r\nAK\r\nMS\r\nDE\r\nWV$

Note that my pattern was meant to test one state abbreviation at a time.

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I am sorry maybe I am not understanding something. I tried again with

^(?!ME|WV)[A-Z]{2}$

In the sample text I had just AK, however no matches were found.

Possibly the copy-and-paste of the pattern left a space at the end.

See the pattern and sample text here:

http://www.myregextester.com/?r=289

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You are exactly right, the reg ex is correct, I had copied over an extra space. Thanks for all your help!