Right, I understand different regex flavors work differently; what I was questioning was whether the capture group negation syntax was any more "predictable" (f

Right, I understand different regex flavors work differently; what I was questioning was whether the capture group negation syntax was any more "predictable" (for OP's concerns) than the `.` matching. Because the article recommends using a capture group negation to match a character when you know a specific character or set of characters won't be in the group, but doesn't mention why capture groups (and negations) are acceptable to use, while the `.` should be avoided ("because it might have this less predictable behaviour that I'm totally going to avoid talking about with capture group negations")