Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes

Lesson 3. Matching Sets of Characters

In this lesson you’ll learn how to work with sets of characters. Unlike the ., which matches any single character (as you learned in the previous lesson), sets enable you to match specific characters and character ranges.

Matching One of Several Characters

As you learned in the previous lesson, . matches any one character (as does any literal character). In the final example in that lesson, .a was used to match both na and sa, . matched both the n and s. But what if there was a file (containing Canadian sales data) named ca1.xls as well, and you still wanted to match only na and sa? . would also match c, and so that filename would also be matched.

To find n or s you would not want to match any character, ...