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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.
The string-search functions in Lua script can run extremely fast, comparing millions of characters per second. For example, a search of a 40,000-character article text, for 99 separate words (passed as 99 parameters in a template), ran within one second of Lua CPU clock time.
This module is intended to provide access to basic string functions. Most of the functions provided here can be invoked with named parameters, unnamed parameters, or a mixture. If named parameters are used, Mediawiki will automatically remove any leading or trailing whitespace from the
Note: Lua patterns are not regular expressions in the traditional POSIX sense, and they are not even a subset of regular expressions. But they share many constructs with regular expressions (more below). Lua patterns are used to define, find and handle a pattern in a string. It can do the common search and replace action in a text, but it has ...
Wikipedia:Lua style guide – standards to improve the readability of code through consistency "What do converted templates look like?" (slideshow) Help:Lua debugging – a how-to guide about debugging Lua modules; Help:Lua for beginners – basic tutorial and pointers; Wikipedia:Lua string functions – string performance considerations and limits
This module is subject to page protection.It is a highly visible module in use by a very large number of pages, or is substituted very frequently. Because vandalism or mistakes would affect many pages, and even trivial editing might cause substantial load on the servers, it is protected from editing.
String interning also reduces memory usage if there are many instances of the same string value; for instance, it is read from a network or from storage. Such strings may include magic numbers or network protocol information. For example, XML parsers may intern names of tags and attributes to save memory.
Running your code through an IDE is helpful for its text highlighting features, which can help you quickly spot syntax errors. Any IDE with the ability to install a Lua text highlighting plugin should work. This could be as simple as Notepad++ (with Lua selected from the language menu) or as full-featured as Visual Studio Code.