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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. ...
/B Matches pattern if at the beginning of a line. /E Matches pattern if at the end of a line. /L Uses search strings literally. /R Uses search strings as regular expressions. /S Searches for matching files in the current directory and all subdirectories. /I Specifies that the search is not to be case-sensitive. /X Prints lines that match exactly.
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 ...
find wildcard expressions and regular expressions. A search matches what you see rendered on the screen and in a print preview. The raw "source" wikitext is searchable by employing the insource parameter. For these two kinds of searches a word is any string of consecutive letters and numbers matching a whole word or phrase.
This covers enough regex to get started using this template to answer any question about wikitext contents on the wiki. Regex are about using meta characters to create patterns that match any literal characters. The pattern you give will match a target, character by character.
Regex searches are likely to time out unless you further limit the search in some way, such as by including another parameter or a search term outside of the insource component of the search string. (For example, X* intitle:/X/ to restrict the search to initial position.) For more details, see mw:Help:CirrusSearch#Regular expression searches.
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.
# Syntax is as follows: # * Everything from a "#" character to the end of the line is a comment # * Every non-blank line is a regex fragment which will only match hosts inside URLs # # ----- # PLEASE DO NOT MODIFY THIS LIST UNLESS YOU HAVE A BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF REGEX # ----- # # ----- # Please discuss additions publicly such as at the Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard # ----- # # This ...