simply because it is easier

That’s apparently a matter of opinion. To me, negative lookbehind, where it’s telling you “look behind the current position, and make sure it’s not XYZ” is a lot easier to read/understand than “match something, then say, wait no, I don’t actually want to match that, let’s fail this whole path and move on to the alternation”. (And, from what I can tell, that’s not really a good explanation of skip+fail, because it takes our regex guru pages of text to explain it, whereas I can successfully convey the meaning of a negative lookbehind in one sentence.)

Since your first version of the skip+fail post was wrong, and you couldn’t tell this immediately, even after it was pointed out to you that it was wrong, I am not convinced that it’s truly as “simple” – even for you – as you are implying.

I am going to stick with recommending solutions that i could explain if necessary; I will only personally link to the skip+fail formula if I know of no other way to do something (and I wouldn’t tell anyone it’s “simple”)

But if it truly makes more sense to you than a negative lookbehind, that’s great for you; everyone is different.

@Alan-Kilborn Yes, please check it out on Notepad++

It didn’t work. It found 0 matches, when it should have found one. Please be careful when giving advice, that it at least does what you claim it does.

This is not a situation where you need the complications of skip/fail. As @Alan-Kilborn showed, it can be done with a simple non-regex search; if it can be done simply, trying to apply the complicated formula is the wrong thing to do. Even with regex, it would be easier in this case to use a fixed positive negative lookbehind (since the semicolon is always one character, you don’t need to worry about variable size, so the Boost regex engine can handle th lookbehind just fine), rather than trying to apply the advanced skip/fail.

To future readers: the post I quoted got changed while I was replying to it. Sorry that it makes it look like I was making up quotes. Even after @dr-ramaanand’s change to his post, my claim that this is not a situation where skip/fail is needed still stands.

What Im trying to get help with is, find any interface name without semi colon in front

@dr-ramaanand said:

;interface(*SKIP)(*FAIL)|;interface

@dr-ramaanand Does this meet the need?

In case you are trying to do any other possible text manipulation, searching, highlighting, etc, etc, or anything you can possibly think of doing to your text, please consult the Notepad++ online user manual, because your answer is probably found there.

find and highlight the word interface from 192.168.1.1;interface but not from 192.168.1.3interface,

You probably have this setting checkmarked:

Uncheckmark it.

The software sometimes even gives you instruction about this: