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A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), [1] sometimes referred to as rational expression, ... Matches the beginning of a string (but not an internal line).
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 rendered contents of the page. To perform a regex search, use the ordinary search box with the syntax insource:/regex/ or intitle:/regex/.
For example, prefix:help:t finds Help pagenames that begin with "T". When the string has zero characters all pages in the given namespace are found. When the string has all the characters a pagename, a single page is found. The string is not case sensitive. The namespace can be an namespace alias, like WP for Wikipedia.
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.
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.
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
A regular expression or regex is a sequence of characters that define a pattern to be searched for in a text. Each occurrence of the pattern may then be automatically replaced with another string, which may include parts of the identified pattern. AutoWikiBrowser uses the .NET flavor of regex. [1]
Extreme examples occur when these are combined – Uniform Naming Convention paths begin with \\, and thus an escaped regular expression matching a UNC name begins with 8 backslashes, "\\\\\", due to needing to escape the string and the regular expression. Using raw strings reduces this to 4 (escaping in the regular expression), as in C# @"\\\\".