Anchors are used to tell the regular expression where to start and end the evaluation of a string. The most common anchors evaluate the characters at the beginning or the end of a string. This allows you to validate that the string starts and/or ends with a digit, symbol, or letter character. The most common anchors are:
^
and \A
: The ^
and \A
anchor characters indicates matching at the start of a string for evaluation. If you want to ensure that a certain pattern is matched at the beginning, you will use ^
or \A
. The \A
syntax is symbolic of the first character in the alphabet which is a
. This is why regular expressions use this character to designate the evaluation from the start of a string.$
and \Z
: The $
and \Z
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