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A very simple case of a regular expression in this syntax is to locate a word spelled two different ways in a text editor, the regular expression seriali[sz]e matches both "serialise" and "serialize". Wildcard characters also achieve this, but are more limited in what they can pattern, as they have fewer metacharacters and a simple language-base.
A regex search scans the text of each page on Wikipedia in real time, character by character, to find pages that match a specific sequence or pattern of characters. Unlike keyword searching, regex searching is by default case-sensitive, does not ignore punctuation, and operates directly on the page source (MediaWiki markup) rather than on the ...
If the portion of the regular expression is "greedy", it will match as many characters as possible. If it is not greedy, it will match as few characters as possible. By default, quantifiers in AWB are greedy. To make a quantifier non-greedy, it must be followed by a question mark. For example: In this string:
In regular expressions, the period (., also called "dot") is the wildcard pattern which matches any single character. Combined with the asterisk operator .* it will match any number of any characters. In this case, the asterisk is also known as the Kleene star.
As an ad hoc sandbox, you can show the wikitext of a section like this, (already saved in the database), modify some of the patterns in the regex-search-link template calls on this page, do a Show Preview, and see what matches when you click on the newly formed regex search-link, all quite safely, and without changing a thing in the database.
Regular Expression Flavor Comparison – Detailed comparison of the most popular regular expression flavors; Regexp Syntax Summary; Online Regular Expression Testing – with support for Java, JavaScript, .Net, PHP, Python and Ruby; Implementing Regular Expressions – series of articles by Russ Cox, author of RE2; Regular Expression Engines
As an ad hoc sandbox, you can show the wikitext of a section like this, (already saved in the database), modify some of the patterns in the regex-search-link template calls on this page, do a Show Preview, and see what matches when you click on the newly formed regex search-link, all quite safely, and without changing a thing in the database.
Regular expressions (or regex) are a common and very versatile programming technique for manipulating strings. On Wikipedia you can use a limited version of regex called a Lua pattern to select and modify bits of text from a string. The pattern is a piece of code describing what you are looking for in the string.