Regular Expressions/Glossary
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 }