How to set the first character via regex?

The first character can be anything except an equals sign (=).

I made the following regex:

[^=].

ab, b2 etc will pass, and =a will not.

But the thing is, I also want to accept single character:

a should also be accepted. How can I do that?

Update

You might wonder why I'm doing it. I have a URL regex

(?!=)((www\.|(https?开发者_Go百科|ftp)://)[.a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z0-9/_:@=.+?,#%&~-]*[^.'#!()?, ><;])

but I don't want the URL to be parsed if it's right after the = character.

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Try a negative lookahead:

^(?!=)

^ matches the start of the input, and (?!...) is a negative look ahead. It also matches an empty string.

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If this is the only constraint in your regex, you should try to use the API provided by the language you're working with to get the first character of a string.

String s = "myString";
if(s.Length == 0 || s[0] != '=')
    //Your code here

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If you really want a regex look at @Bart solution.

Here is an alternative without look ahead /^([^=]|$)/

^        <- Starts with
(        <- Start of a group
  [^=]     <- Any char but =
  |        <- Or
  $        <- End of the match
)        <- End of the group

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You don't need RegEx. There is String.StartsWith...

if ( ! theString.StartsWith("=") ) {
   ...

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Anchor to the beginning and end, and make the whole thing optional.

^(?:[^=].*)?$

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Couldn't you just use ^= and act if there is no match in your code?