Regexp to match everything before certain characters in php

I need the regex expression to match everything from beginning till I encounter one of these characters ; or [ or { or ( In case these characters are开发者_如何学编程 not there then the whole word needs to be matched..

I am using preg_match("/(.*?)(?=(;|\[|\(|{|))/", $word , $val);

The first group should be there as I need the matched value in $val. This is php. Can somebody please help me with this?

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preg_match("/^([^[{(;]*)/", $word , $val);

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"/(.*?)[;\\[\\{\\($]/" should do the trick and be a lot easier. Note that you'll have to escape characters that have special meanings in regular expressions. $ matches the end of the line/string (depending on parameters).

Edit: Think Anomie's solution might even be a tid bit faster due to only matching one sub expression.