The notion that regex doesn't support inverse matching is not entirely true. You can mimic this behavior by using negative look-arounds:

^((?!hede).)*$

The regex above will match any string, or line without a line break, not containing the (sub)string 'hede'. As mentioned, this is not something regex is "good" at (or should do), but still, it is possible.

And if you need to match line break chars as well, use the DOT-ALL modifier (the trailing s in the following pattern):

/^((?!hede).)*$/s

or use it inline:

/(?s)^((?!hede).)*$/

(where the /.../ are the regex delimiters, i.e., not part of the pattern)

If the DOT-ALL modifier is not available, you can mimic the same behavior with the character class [\s\S]:

/^((?!hede)[\s\S])*$/

Explanation

A string is just a list of n characters. Before, and after each character, there's an empty string. So a list of n characters will have n+1 empty strings. Consider the string "ABhedeCD":

    ┌──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┬───┬──┐
S = │e1│ A │e2│ B │e3│ h │e4│ e │e5│ d │e6│ e │e7│ C │e8│ D │e9│
    └──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┴───┴──┘
    
index    0      1      2      3      4      5      6      7

where the e's are the empty strings. The regex (?!hede). looks ahead to see if there's no substring "hede" to be seen, and if that is the case (so something else is seen), then the . (dot) will match any character except a line break. Look-arounds are also called zero-width-assertions because they don't consume any characters. They only assert/validate something.

So, in my example, every empty string is first validated to see if there's no "hede" up ahead, before a character is consumed by the . (dot). The regex (?!hede). will do that only once, so it is wrapped in a group, and repeated zero or more times: ((?!hede).)*. Finally, the start- and end-of-input are anchored to make sure the entire input is consumed: ^((?!hede).)*$

As you can see, the input "ABhedeCD" will fail because on e3, the regex (?!hede) fails (there is "hede" up ahead!).

A great way to do this is to use negative lookahead:

^(?!.*bar).*$

The negative lookahead construct is the pair of parentheses, with the opening parenthesis followed by a question mark and an exclamation point. Inside the lookahead [is any regex pattern].

Your ^((?!Drive).)*$ did not work at all because you tested against a multiline input.

You should use /m modifier to see what the regex matches. It just matches lines that do not contain Drive, but that tempered greedy token does not check if EFI is inside the string.

Actually, the $ anchor is redundant here since .* matches any zero or more characters other than line break characters. You may simply remove it from your pattern.

(NOTE: In .NET, you will need to use [^\r\n]* instead of .* since . in a .NET pattern matches any char but a newline, LF, char, and matches all other line break chars, like a carriage return, CR, etc.).

Use something like

^(?!.*Drive).*EFI.*

Or, if you need to only fail the match if a Drive is present as a whole word:

^(?!.*\bDrive\b).*EFI.*

Or, if there are more words you want to signal the failure with:

^(?!.*(?:Drive|SomethingElse)).*EFI.*
^(?!.*\b(?:Drive|SomethingElse)\b).*EFI.*

See regex demo

Here,

• ^ - matches start of string
• (?!.*Drive) - makes sure there is no "Drive" in the string (so, Drives are NOT allowed)
• (?!.*\bDrive\b) - makes sure there is no "Drive" as a whole word in the string (so, Drives are allowed)
• .* - any 0+ chars other than line break chars, as many as possible
• EFI - anEFI substring
• .* - any 0+ chars other than line break chars, as many as possible.

If your string has newlines, either use a /s dotall modifier or replace . with [\s\S].

The short answer: ^((?!SCREEN).)*$

This is inspired by https://stackoverflow.com/questions/406230/regular-expression-to-match-a-line-that-doesnt-contain-a-word which contains a full explanation

Firstly, you need to escape your . character as that's taken as any character in Regex.

Secondly, you need to add in a Match if suffix is not present group - signified by the (?!) syntax.

You may also want to put a circumflex ^ to signify the start of a new line and change your * (any repetitions) to a + (one or more repititions).

^/\w+\.(?!action)\w+ is the finished Regex.