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Sed regular expressions, particularly those using the "s" operator, are much similar to Perl (sed is a predecessor to Perl). The default delimiter is "/", but any delimiter can be used; the default is s / regexp / replacement /, but s: regexp: replacement: is also a valid form. For example, to match a "pub" directory (as in the Perl example ...
A metacharacter is a character that has a special meaning to a computer program, such as a shell interpreter or a regular expression (regex) engine.. In POSIX extended regular expressions, there are 14 metacharacters that must be escaped — preceded by a backslash (\) — in order to drop their special meaning and be treated literally inside an expression: opening and closing square brackets ...
The backslash (\) escape character typically provides two ways to include double-quotes inside a string literal, either by modifying the meaning of the double-quote character embedded in the string (\" becomes "), or by modifying the meaning of a sequence of characters including the hexadecimal value of a double-quote character (\x22 becomes ").
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 .
Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) is a library written in C, which implements a regular expression engine, inspired by the capabilities of the Perl programming language. Philip Hazel started writing PCRE in summer 1997. [ 3 ]
An actual backslash is produced by a double backslash \\. Regular expression languages used it the same way, changing subsequent literal characters into metacharacters and vice versa. For instance \||b searches for either '|' or 'b', the first bar is escaped and searched for, the second is not escaped and acts as an "or".
Greed, in regular expression context, describes the number of characters which will be matched (often also stated as "consumed") by a variable length portion of a regular expression – a token or group followed by a quantifier, which specifies a number (or range of numbers) of tokens. If the portion of the regular expression is "greedy", it ...
For example, \n does not represent a backslash followed by the letter n. The backslash escapes the compiler's normal, literal way of interpreting character data. After a backslash, the compiler expects subsequent characters to complete one of the defined escape sequences, and then translates the escape sequence into the characters it represents.