Basic syntax

The simplest form a regular expression can take is a plain text string without any special characters. This will match each of the literal characters in the string exactly. Matches are case sensitive by default. For example, the pattern regular represents only the second (lowercase) instance of this word in the following string:

Regular expressions are a standardized (regular) way of representing patterns in text using special symbols and syntax.

In other words, the first word of the sentence (Regular) will not be matched because it is uppercase, and the search pattern was regular rather than Regular.

If you wanted to find both regular and Regular, you could either turn off case sensitive matching (see later in this workshop), or use a different pattern, such as [Rr]egular to match both capital R and lowercase r in the text.

Any string that does not contain the reserved characters (i.e., [ ] ( ) { } . * + ? ^ $ \ |) will be interpreted literally in a regular expression.

Special characters

The following characters (or tokens) have special meaning in regular expressions:

`.`	Period matches any single character except a line break.
`[]`	Character class. Matches any character contained between the square brackets.
`[^]`	Negated character class. Matches any character that is not contained between the square brackets
`*`	Matches 0 or more repetitions of the preceding symbol.
`+`	Matches 1 or more repetitions of the preceding symbol.
`?`	Makes the preceding symbol optional.
`{n,m}`	Braces. Matches at least “n” but not more than “m” repetitions of the preceding symbol.
`(xyz)`	Character group. Matches the characters xyz in that exact order.
`\|`	Alternation. Matches either the characters before or the characters after the symbol.
`\`	Escapes the next character. This allows you to match reserved characters `[ ] ( ) { } . * + ? ^ $ \ \|`
`^`	Matches the beginning of the input.
`$`	Matches the end of the input.