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Given regular expressions R and S, the following operations over them are defined to produce regular expressions: (concatenation) (RS) denotes the set of strings that can be obtained by concatenating a string accepted by R and a string accepted by S (in that order). For example, let R denote {"ab", "c"} and S denote {"d", "ef"}.
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/.
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. A space between the namespace and pagename is allowed.
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 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.
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.
TRE is an open-source library for pattern matching in text, [2] which works like a regular expression engine with the ability to do approximate string matching. [3] It was developed by Ville Laurikari [1] and is distributed under a 2-clause BSD-like license.
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.