Regular Expression For A String Containing One Word But Not Another

Last weekend, one our apps that is hosted on Heroku were reporting a lot of R14 errors.

R14 is an error that thrown by Heroku if the machine is running out of memory.

I quickly jumped into (logentries)[https://logentries.com/] to download the log file and opened it in Sublime Text.

However, I was having problem finding the request that is causing the problem because we also have our background job workers reporting R14 errors.

I decided to use regex to find a line that has R14 but doesn’t contain any of the background worker’s name,

This is the regex that I used to find the line:

^(?!.*(lowworker|highworker|run)).*R14.*$

The regex above will match the line that has R14 but doesn’t contain lowworker or highworker and run

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