Negative Lookahead Regular Expression Search

In order to run a negative lookahead regular expression search, you can enclose the string you do NOT want the searched for string to appear in front of, in parentheses with a question mark and exclamation point before the given string. So in this example this search: Albany(?!\s+NY)

. . . will find any instance in which Albany is not followed by ' NY'.

This search can be modified to find any string - .* - which does not precede the state abbreviation NY - (?:(?!NY).).$

.*(?:(?!NY).).$