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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. ...
«FUNCTION» LENGTH(string) or «FUNCTION» BYTE-LENGTH(string) number of characters and number of bytes, respectively COBOL: string length string: a decimal string giving the number of characters Tcl: ≢ string: APL: string.len() Number of bytes Rust [30] string.chars().count() Number of Unicode code points Rust [31]
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]
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
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.
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.
An advanced regexp uses the metacharacters to program general string patterns. It finds everything, even pieces and parts of words, conveying no notion of "words", but only that of a string of characters in a sequence. Metacharacters are interpreted unless quoted by a backslash, double quotes, or square brackets. See the section on regex.
Regex searches that take too long will "time out" and return only partial results. Overuse of slow regex searches might cause temporary throttling of the feature for yourself and/or everyone on Wikipedia. (However, you cannot affect the site performance of Wikipedia as a whole simply by abusing regex search.) Remember that a single regex search ...