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 }