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Regular Expressions/Glossary

From Wikibooks, open books for an open world

This is a glossary of the book.

\A
In some flavors, the beginning of a string but not of a line in the string
\b
In some flavors, a word boundary
\B
In some flavors, a complement to \b
BRE
Basic regular expressions
\d
In some flavors, a digit
\D
In some flavors, a complement to \d
Emacs
A scriptable text editor with support for regular expressions
ERE
Extended regular expressions
GNU
A project to create a free-as-in-freedom operating system, which provides extensions to regular expressions used in tools such as Grep or Sed
Greedy
Of an operator, matching as much as it can
Grep
A command-line tool for finding lines in a text files that match a regular expression
Java
A byte-compiled programming language with support for regular expressions in its standard library since version 1.4
JavaScript
A scripting languages for the web supported by web browsers, with built-in support for regular expressions
Metacharacter
A character or sequence of characters with a special meaning, such as "." or "\+".
PCRE
Perl compatible regular expressions
Perl
An interpreted scripting language noted for its regular expressions
PHP
An interpreted scripting language with support for regular expressions
Regex
A regular expression
Regular expression
A string containing special characters indicating patterns, intended to match literal strings
\s
In some flavors, a whitespace character: space, tab, newline, form feed
\s-
In Emacs, a whitespace character
\S
In some flavors, a complement to \s
Sed
A non-interactive editor or command-line tool noted for its "s" command substituting strings that match a regular expression with other strings
\u13F
In some flavors, the character with the hexadecimal Unicode value of 13F.
Vim
A scriptable text editor with support for regular expressions
\w
In some flavors, an alphanumeric character, including "_"
\W
In some flavors, a complement to \w
\xF7
In some flavors, the character with the hexadecimal ASCII value of F7.
\x{13F}
In some flavors, the character with the hexadecimal Unicode value of 13F.
\Z
In some flavors, the end of a string but not of a line in the string
\<
In some flavors, an empty string before the beginning of a word
\>
In some flavors, an empty string after the end of a word
^
The beginning of a line
$
The end of a line
.
Any single character, but possibly not a newline
[
The opening of a character class
]
The closing of a character class
(
In some flavors, the opening of a group
)
In some flavors, the closing of a group
\(
In some flavors, the opening of a group
\)
In some flavors, the closing of a group
{
In some flavors, the opening of a match-count iterator
}
In some flavors, the closing of a match-count iterator
\{
In some flavors, the opening of a match-count iterator
\}
In some flavors, the closing of a match-count iterator
|
In some flavors, a marking of an alternative
\|
In some flavors, a marking of an alternative
\1
In some flavors, a backreference to the 1st group
\2
In some flavors, a backreference to the 2nd group
*
Any number of the previous
+
In some flavors, one or more of the previous
\+
In some flavors, one or more of the previous
?
In some flavors, one or none of the previous
\?
In some flavors, one or none of the previous
*?
In some flavors, a non-greedy version of *
+?
In some flavors, a non-greedy version of +
}?
In some flavors, a non-greedy version of }