XSLT, 2nd Edition

Metacharacters

Within a regular expression, most characters represent themselves. For example, the regular expression A represents a capital A. There are, of course, special characters that are processed differently:

.

By default, this matches any character except the newline character. In dot-all mode, this matches the newline character as well.

^

By default, this represents the beginning of the string literal. In multiline mode, this represents the beginning of a line within the string.

[XPath] Use of the caret to indicate that the beginning of a string or line is an addition to the regular expression syntax defined by XML Schema.

The caret can also be used inside a character class expression to indicate the negation of that character set. For example, [a-f] represents the letters a through f, while [^a-f] represents every character except the letters a through f.

$

[XPath] By default, this represents the end of the string literal. In multiline mode, this represents the end of a line within the string.

\

Escapes the following character.

|

The union operator. The expression A|B matches both A and B. It does not match AB.

?

Zero or one of a pattern. For example, A[A-Z]?Z matches AZ and ABZ, but not ABCZ.

*

Zero or more of a pattern. For example, A[A-Z]* matches any string of uppercase basic Latin characters that starts with A and is followed by zero or more uppercase Latin characters. The strings A, ABC, AA, and AREALLYLONGSTRING all match this expression.

+

One or more of a pattern. For example, ...