About Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are used to perform string matching. See the following tables for some common examples of regular expressions.

Element

What it Means

Example

.

The dot or period character represents any character except new line character.

do. matches doe, dog, don, dos, dot, and so on. d.r matches deer, door, and so on.

*

The asterisk character means zero or more instances of the preceding element.

do* matches d, do, doo, dooo, doooo, and so on.

+

The plus sign character means one or more instances of the preceding element.

 

?

 

 

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