A regular expression is a pattern that describes a set of strings. A regular expression is a sequence of any of the following items:
- literal character
- matching character
- repetition clause
- alternation clause
- subpattern grouped with parenthesis
Regular expressions syntax
The following table lists the regular expression syntax with its corresponding descriptions:
Syntax | Description |
. | Matches any character; used as a wildcard when creating a search string. |
* | Matches zero or more instances of the previous pattern item. |
+ | Matches one or more instances of the previous pattern item. |
? | Matches zero or one instance of the previous pattern item. |
( ) | Groups subpattern; repetition and alternation operators apply to the entire preceding subpattern. |
| | Allows for an alternation of a pattern. For example, to match Hello or hello in a string, the regular expression should read: Hello|hello. |
[ ] | Delimits a set of characters; the range is specified as [x-y]. If the first character in the set is ^, there is a match only when the remaining characters in the set are not present. |
^ | Anchors the pattern to the beginning of the string; this character must be the first character in the set. |
$ | Anchors the pattern to the end of the string; this character must be the last character in the set. |
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2 Comments
Daniel Ciorciari
It would be useful to include some examples on this page, in particular for the *** syntax, which is different than the more common .* syntax.
For example, typical regular expression syntax when you are looking for a sentence that starts with "Something" followed by any number of characters would be:
^Something.*
This document suggests the syntax should be:
^Something.***
Shweta Patil
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for pointing this out. We have corrected the documentation.
Thanks,
Shweta