I am usually pretty good at regexes but this one has me stumped. I want to basically match any line that has a period in it, but only if that period is not part of a salutation. Ideally I want to do this with a single regex. Thus: 'end of line. And we continue' # should match 'The incredible Mrs. Robner' # should not match 'Sammy Davis Jr. is an okay guy.' # should match, due to last . I tried doing something logical, like: /(?!Jr\.|Sr\.|Miss\.|Mr\.|Mrs\.)\./ but, alas, this does not work. Any ideas?