Many of you are familiar with wild cards (in the Unix world, it is called glob pattern) matching of text. Here:
- ? matches any single character
- * matches any sequence of characters
- [abc] matches any one character inside square brackets, so it will match a, b, or c
The regular expression pattern goes many steps farther than wild cards, where one can set many rules in a regex pattern, such as the following:
- Match a character or a group of characters optionally (0 or 1 times)
- Use quantifiers in regex patterns to match variable length text
- Use a character class to match one of the listed characters or match a range of characters
- Use a negated character class to match any character except those matched ...