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regular expression

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Regular Expression

A regular expression is a pattern that can be matched against data (e.g. text) to see if it matches. Regular expressions can also capture data from what they are matching.

Examples of patterns include:-

• \d+ matches one or more digits
• \w matches one alphanumeric character *
• (-?)([.\w]*)\(([+\-]?[.\w]*)x([.\w]*[+\-]?[.\w]*)\)\^([+\-]?[.\w]+) matches a mathematical function in the form (ax+b)^n

Perl is a language with a powerful implementation of regular expressions - see also a tutorial on pattern matching in Perl. (Some would argue that some patterns you can do in Perl are hardly regular though!).

* Though with the advent of unicode the definition of alphanumeric is somewhat changed.
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