regex negative lookbehind assertion not working correctly?

[MRAB]

Gabriel Rossetti wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I am trying to write a regex pattern to match an ID in a URL only if it 
> is not a given ID. Here's an example, the ID not to match is 
> "14522XXX98", if my URL is "/profile.php?id=14522XXX99" I want it to 
> match and if it's "/profile.php?id=14522XXX98" I want it not to. I tried 
> this:
> 
>  >>> re.search(r"/profile.php\?id=(\d+)(?<!14522XXX98)", 
> "/profile.php?id=14522XXX98").groups()
> ('14522XXX9',)
> 
> which should not match, but it does, then I tried this :
> 
[snip]
How can '(\d+)' be capturing '14522XXX9'? '\d' matches only digits!

Anyway, your basic problem is that it initially matches '14522XXX98',
but then the lookbehind rejects that, so it backtracks and releases the
last character, giving '14522XXX9', which is not be rejected because
'14522XXX9' isn't '14522XXX98'.

Try putting a '\b' after the '\d+' to reject partial IDs.