In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means to "match" (specify and recognize) strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Common abbreviations for "regular expression" include regex and regexp.
The concept of regular expressions was first popularized by utilities provided by Unix distributions, in particular the editor ed and the filter grep. A regular expression is written in a formal language that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor, which is a program that either serves as a parser generator or examines text and identifies parts that match the provided specification. Historically, the concept of regular expressions is associated with Kleene's formalism of regular sets, introduced in the 1950s.
The following are examples of specifications which can be expressed as a regular expression:
- The sequence of characters "car" appearing consecutively, such as in "car", "cartoon", or "bicarbonate"
- The word "car" when it appears as an isolated word (and delimited from other words, typically through whitespace characters)
- The word "car" when preceded by the word "motor" (and separated by a named delimiter, or multiple.)
Regular expressions are used by many text editors, utilities, and programming languages to search and manipulate text based on patterns. Some of these languages, including Perl, Ruby, AWK, and Tcl, integrate regular expressions into the syntax of the core language itself. Other programming languages like .NET languages, Java, and Python instead provide regular expressions through standard libraries. For yet other languages, such as Object Pascal (Delphi) and C and C++, non-core libraries are available (however, version C++11 provides regular expressions in its Standard Libraries).
As an example of the syntax, the regular expression \bex can be used to search for all instances of the string "ex" occurring after "word boundaries". Thus \bex will find the matching string "ex" in two possible locations, (1) at the beginning of words, and (2) between two characters in a string, where the first is not a word character and the second is a word character. For instance, in the string "Texts for experts", \bex matches the "ex" in "experts" but not in "Texts" (because the "ex" occurs inside a word and not immediately after a word boundary).
Many modern computing systems provide wildcard characters in matching filenames from a file system. This is a core capability of many command-line shells and is also known as globbing. Wildcards differ from regular expressions in generally expressing only limited forms of patterns.
Read more about Regular Expression: History, Basic Concepts, Formal Language Theory, Syntax, Patterns For Non-regular Languages, Fuzzy Regular Expressions, Implementations and Running Times, Unicode, Uses, Examples
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