On Oct 25, 8:49 am, Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch <bj_... at gmx.net> wrote: > > needle = re.compile(r'create\s+or\s+replace\s+package(\s+body)?\s+', > re.IGNORECASE) What I want here is a RE that return ONLY the line without the "body" keyword. Your RE return both. I know I could use it but I want to learn how to search something that is NOT in the string using RE.