Regular Expressions/Glossary

This is a glossary of the book.


 * \A: In some flavors, the beginning of a string but not of a line in the string
 * \b: In some flavors, a word boundary
 * \B: In some flavors, a complement to \b
 * BRE: Basic regular expressions
 * \d: In some flavors, a digit
 * \D: In some flavors, a complement to \d
 * Emacs: A scriptable text editor with support for regular expressions
 * ERE: Extended regular expressions
 * GNU: A project to create a free-as-in-freedom operating system, which provides extensions to regular expressions used in tools such as Grep or Sed
 * Greedy: Of an operator, matching as much as it can
 * Grep: A command-line tool for finding lines in a text files that match a regular expression
 * Java: A byte-compiled programming language with support for regular expressions in its standard library since version 1.4
 * JavaScript: A scripting languages for the web supported by web browsers, with built-in support for regular expressions
 * Metacharacter: A character or sequence of characters with a special meaning, such as "." or "\+".
 * PCRE: Perl compatible regular expressions
 * Perl: An interpreted scripting language noted for its regular expressions
 * PHP: An interpreted scripting language with support for regular expressions
 * Regex: A regular expression
 * Regular expression: A string containing special characters indicating patterns, intended to match literal strings
 * \s: In some flavors, a whitespace character: space, tab, newline, form feed
 * \s-: In Emacs, a whitespace character
 * \S: In some flavors, a complement to \s
 * Sed: A non-interactive editor or command-line tool noted for its "s" command substituting strings that match a regular expression with other strings
 * \u13F: In some flavors, the character with the hexadecimal Unicode value of 13F.
 * Vim: A scriptable text editor with support for regular expressions
 * \w: In some flavors, an alphanumeric character, including "_"
 * \W: In some flavors, a complement to \w
 * \xF7: In some flavors, the character with the hexadecimal ASCII value of F7.
 * \x{13F}: In some flavors, the character with the hexadecimal Unicode value of 13F.
 * \Z: In some flavors, the end of a string but not of a line in the string
 * \<: In some flavors, an empty string before the beginning of a word
 * \>: In some flavors, an empty string after the end of a word
 * ^: The beginning of a line
 * $: The end of a line
 * .: Any single character, but possibly not a newline
 * [: The opening of a character class
 * ]: The closing of a character class
 * (: In some flavors, the opening of a group
 * ): In some flavors, the closing of a group
 * \(: In some flavors, the opening of a group
 * \): In some flavors, the closing of a group
 * {: In some flavors, the opening of a match-count iterator
 * }: In some flavors, the closing of a match-count iterator
 * \{: In some flavors, the opening of a match-count iterator
 * \}: In some flavors, the closing of a match-count iterator
 * |: In some flavors, a marking of an alternative
 * \|: In some flavors, a marking of an alternative
 * \1: In some flavors, a backreference to the 1st group
 * \2: In some flavors, a backreference to the 2nd group
 * *: Any number of the previous
 * +: In some flavors, one or more of the previous
 * \+: In some flavors, one or more of the previous
 * ?: In some flavors, one or none of the previous
 * \?: In some flavors, one or none of the previous
 * *?: In some flavors, a non-greedy version of *
 * +?: In some flavors, a non-greedy version of +
 * }?: In some flavors, a non-greedy version of }