basi wrote:
> Thanks much! I haven't tried it yet, but it looks so elegant it must
> work. 

One thing I screwed up:  If you want to avoid strings that contain ng 
*anywhere,* do the negative look-ahead before you match the consonants:


consonant = '[bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz]'
r = /(?!.*ng)#{consonant}{3,}/