Regular Expressions

A regular expression, regex or regexp (sometimes called a rational expression) is, in theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a sequence of characters that define a search pattern. Usually this pattern is then used by string searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings.

The concept arose in the 1950s when the American mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene formalized the description of a regular language. The concept came into common use with Unix text-processing utilities. Today, different syntaxes for writing regular expressions exist, one being the POSIX standard and another, widely used, being the Perl syntax.

Regular expressions are used in search engines, search and replace dialogs of word processors and text editors, in text processing utilities such as sed and AWK and in lexical analysis. Many programming languages provide regex capabilities, built-in, or via libraries.

The phrase regular expressions (and consequently, regexes) is often used to mean the specific, standard textual syntax (distinct from the mathematical notation described below) for representing patterns that matching text need to conform to. Each character in a regular expression (that is, each character in the string describing its pattern) is understood to be a metacharacter (with its special meaning), or a regular character (with its literal meaning). For example, in the regex a. a is a literal character which matches just 'a' and . is a meta character which matches every character except a newline. Therefore, this regex would match for example 'a ' or 'ax' or 'a0'. Together, metacharacters and literal characters can be used to identify textual material of a given pattern, or process a number of instances of it. Pattern-matches can vary from a precise equality to a very general similarity (controlled by the metacharacters). For example, . is a very general pattern, [a-z] (match all letters from 'a' to 'z') is less general and a is a precise pattern (match just 'a'). The metacharacter syntax is designed specifically to represent prescribed targets in a concise and flexible way to direct the automation of text processing of a variety of input data, in a form easy to type using a standard ASCII keyboard.

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