Julia 1.0 Programming Complete Reference Guide

Regular expressions

Regular expressions are used for powerful pattern-matching of substrings within strings. They can be used to search for a substring in a string, based on patterns—and then to extract or replace the matches. Julia provides support for Perl-compatible regular expressions.

The most common way to input regular expressions is by using the so-called nonstandard string literals. These look like regular double-quoted strings, but carry a special prefix. In the case of regular expressions, this prefix is "r". The prefix provides for a different behavior, compared to a normal string literal.

For example, in order to define a regular string that matches all the letters, we can use r"[a-zA-Z]*".

Julia provides quite a few nonstandard ...