11.6. Converting strings and regular expressions to each other
The fact that regular expressions aren’t strings is easy to absorb at a glance in the case of regular expressions like this:
/[a-c]{3}/
With its special character-class and repetition syntax, this pattern doesn’t look much like any of the strings it matches ("aaa", "aab", "aac", and so forth).
It gets a little harder not to see a direct link between a regexp and a string when faced with a regexp like this:
/abc/
This regexp isn’t the string "abc". Moreover, it matches not only "abc" but any string with the substring "abc" somewhere inside it (like “Now I know my abcs.”). There’s no unique relationship between a string and a similar-looking regexp.
Still, although the visual resemblance ...
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