Chapter 9. Getting Control—Regular Expression Metacharacters
Regular Expression Metacharacters
Regular expression metacharacters are characters that do not represent themselves. They are endowed with special powers to allow you to control the search pattern in some way (e.g., find the pattern only at the beginning of line or at the end of the line or only if it starts with an upper- or lowercase letter). Metacharacters lose their special meaning if preceded with a backslash (\). For example, the dot metacharacter represents any single character but when preceded with a backslash is just a dot or period.
If you see a backslash preceding a metacharacter, ...
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