| 1. | (text, operating system) | regular expression - (regexp, RE) One of the wild card patterns used by Unix utilities such as grep, sed
and awk and editors such as vi and Emacs. These use
conventions similar to but more elaborate than those described
under glob. A regular expression is a sequence of
characters with the following meanings:
An ordinary character (not one of the special characters
discussed below) matches that character.
A backslash (\) followed by any special character matches the
special character itself. The special characters are:
"." matches any character except NEWLINE; "RE*" (where
the "*" is called the "Kleene star") matches zero
or more occurrences of RE. If there is any choice, the
longest leftmost matching string is chosen, in most
regexp flavours.
"^" at the beginning of an RE matches the start of a line and
"$" at the end of an RE matches the end of a line.
[string] matches any one character in that string. If the
first character of the string is a "^" it matches
any character (except NEWLINE, in most regexp flavours)
and the remaining characters in the string. "-" may be used
to indicate a range of consecutive ASCII characters.
\( RE \) matches whatever RE matches and \n, where n is a
digit, matches whatever was matched by the RE between the nth
\( and its corresponding \) earlier in the same RE. In
many flavours ( RE ) is used instead of \( RE \)
The concatenation of REs is a RE that matches the
concatenation of the strings matched by each RE.
\< matches the beginning of a word and \> matches the end of a
word. In many flavours of regexp, \> and \< are replaced by
"\b", the special character for "word boundary".
RE\m\ matches m occurences of RE. RE\m,\ matches m or
more occurences of RE. RE\m,n\ matches between m and n
occurences.
The exact details of how regexp will work in a given
application vary greatly from flavour to flavour. A comprehensive
survey of regexp flavours is found in Friedl 1997 (see below).
[Jeffrey E.F. Friedl, "Mastering Regular Expressions,
O'Reilly, 1997.] | |