Regular Expressions |
Regular expression is a notation for patterns of text, as opposed to exact strings of characters. The notation uses literal characters and metacharacters. Every character which does not have special meaning in the regular-expression syntax is a literal character and matches an occurrence of that character. For example, letters and numbers are literal characters. A metacharacter is a symbol with special meaning (an operator or delimiter) in the regular-expression syntax.
For example, the following regular expression .* matches any string of characters, ^a matches any string beginning with character a. |