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A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), [1] sometimes referred to as rational expression, [2] [3] is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings , or for input validation .
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
Let c be the number of concatenation of the regular expression E and let s be the number of symbols apart from parentheses — that is, |, *, a and ε. Then, the number of states of A is 2s − c (linear in the size of E). The number of transitions leaving any state is at most two.
The wildcard pattern (often written as _) is also simple: like a variable name, it matches any value, but does not bind the value to any name. Algorithms for matching wildcards in simple string-matching situations have been developed in a number of recursive and non-recursive varieties. [11]
? matches the preceding character or group exactly zero or one times. { } match the preceding character or group a fixed number of times. For example, insource:/[a-z]{2}/ matches exactly 2 lowercase letters in a row. insource:/[a-z]{2,4}/ matches any string of 2, 3, or 4 lowercase letters.
The closeness of a match is measured in terms of the number of primitive operations necessary to convert the string into an exact match. This number is called the edit distance between the string and the pattern. The usual primitive operations are: [1] insertion: cot → coat; deletion: coat → cot
Regular languages are a category of languages (sometimes termed Chomsky Type 3) which can be matched by a state machine (more specifically, by a deterministic finite automaton or a nondeterministic finite automaton) constructed from a regular expression. In particular, a regular language can match constructs like "A follows B", "Either A or B ...
A parsing expression is a kind of pattern that each string may either match or not match.In case of a match, there is a unique prefix of the string (which may be the whole string, the empty string, or something in between) which has been consumed by the parsing expression; this prefix is what one would usually think of as having matched the expression.