Regular expression to get a string between two strings with exception

So I have this string:

My cow always gives milk

My goat sometimes gives milk

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My giraffe always gives milk

My goat always buys milk

And this regex:

(?<=cow ).*(?= milk)|(?<=goat ).*(?= milk)

I am matching:

always gives

sometimes gives

 

always buys

I need to match:

always gives

sometimes gives

 

 

How can I add an exception to my regex to prevent matching anything containing the word "buys"? So I only get matches on the first and second line.

>Solution :

One approach would be to use a tempered dot instead of plain .* to match only words which are not buys:

(?<=\bcow )(?:(?!\bbuys\b).)*(?= milk\b)|(?<=\bgoat )(?:(?!\bbuys\b).)*(?= milk\b)

Here is a working demo.

The "new" part of my answer is the following:

(?:(?!\bbuys\b).)*

This says to match, one character at a time, anything, provided that we do not cross the word buys. So, any word will match the above pattern so long as that word is not buys. This is called a "tempered" dot, because, unlike .*, which blindly matches everything, this tempered dot excludes the word buys.