Exclude strings of words using wildcards

[CHGN]

Hi community,

I cannot seem to come up with the appropriate wildcard (I suppose it must be [!]) which would exclude from the expression

⟨argument[oales]{1,4}⟩

the following three words

argumentos
argumenta
argumentas

In other words, I would like it to find only the following three words

argumento
argumental
argumentales

so maybe it’s the expression ⟨argument[oales]{1,4}⟩ which is not appropriate to begin with.

Note that I am actually trying to find a ‘pattern expession’ so that I can use it with any other morphological word family; thus, those three words are mere examples.
I would use this pattern in a macro, and possibly in Find and Replace option, to implement replacements in batch.

Hope to hear news soon.
Thank you so much in advance.

[PYS]

Hi

If I understand well you can search for:

\bargumento\b|\bargumental\b|\bargumentales\b

Explanation: \b for Word boundaries

Regards

[oweng]

Bearing in mind that pattern matching, as the term indicates, is best used to find rather than exclude patterns, the following will match only the desired terms:

argument(o[^s]|al(es)?)

[PYS]

Hi @oweng

Nice, but may I suggest: argument(o|al(es)?)\b

(not to select the space after the word, to find the the word at the end of the paragraph, to avoid selecting the word followed by a letter other than s, etc.)

Regards

[oweng]

Thanks pierre-yves. That is a distinct improvement for the reason you indicate. I am still thinking of strings rather than words