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In many programming languages, a particular syntax of strings is used to represent regular expressions, which are patterns describing string characters. However, it is possible to perform some string pattern matching within the same framework that has been discussed throughout this article.
? 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.
This is the template test cases page for the sandbox of Template:Regex/string Purge this page to update the examples. If there are many examples of a complicated template, later ones may break due to limits in MediaWiki ; see the HTML comment " NewPP limit report " in the rendered page.
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 .
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.
Metacharacters are interpreted unless quoted by a backslash, double quotes, or square brackets. See the section on regex. The obvious example is, you must quote any slash in your pattern so it won't be interpreted as the closing slash delimiter, using \/ instead of / to match a literal slash. A regexp interprets all metacharacters.
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 string-searching algorithm, sometimes called string-matching algorithm, is an algorithm that searches a body of text for portions that match by pattern. A basic example of string searching is when the pattern and the searched text are arrays of elements of an alphabet ( finite set ) Σ.