The Metacharacters
In all the examples that follow, the portions of text matched by patterns are represented with underlines. Remember that the entire target string is said to match even if just a portion of it matches the regular expression. The underline marks are to help demonstrate exactly what part of the target they match.
It's important to read through the following sections; however, don't worry if the information doesn't immediately make sense; it will shortly. The application of these metacharacters will be demonstrated in a bit.
A Simple Metacharacter
The first of the metacharacters is the dot (.). Inside a regular expression, the dot matches any single character except a newline character. For example, in the pattern /p.t/, the . ...
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