The backslash character (\) in a regular expression indicates that the character that follows it either is a special character (as shown in the following table), or should be interpreted literally. For … See more

Anchors, or atomic zero-width assertions, cause a match to succeed or fail depending on the current position in the string, but they do not cause the engine to advance through the string or consume characters. The metachara… See more

A backreference allows a previously matched subexpression to be identified subsequently in the same regular expression. The following table lists the backreference constructs s… See more

Substitutions are regular expression language elements that are supported in replacement patterns. For more information, see Substitutions. The metacharacters listed in the following table are atomic zero-width asse… See more

Miscellaneous constructs either modify a regular expression pattern or provide information about it. The following table lists the miscellaneous con… See more

A character class matches any one of a set of characters. Character classes include the language elements listed in the following table. For more information, see Character Classes. See more

Grouping constructs delineate subexpressions of a regular expression and typically capture substrings of an input string. Grouping construct… See more

A quantifier specifies how many instances of the previous element (which can be a character, a group, or a character class) must be present in the inpu… See more

Alternation constructs modify a regular expression to enable either/or matching. These constructs include t… See more

You can specify options that control how the regular expression engine interprets a regular expression pattern. Many of these options can be specified either inline (in the regular expression patt… See more