REGULAREXPRESSION

Regular expression

In computing, a regular expression is a sequence of characters that forms a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or string matching, i.e. "find and replace"-like operations. The concept arose in the 1950s, when the American mathematician Stephen Kleene formalized the description of a regular language, and came into common use with the Unix text processing utilities ed, an editor, and grep, a filter.

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regular expression

Noun

  1. A concise description of a regular formal language with notations for concatenation, alternation, and iteration (repetition) of subexpressions.
  2. Any pattern for text matching or searching, frequently offering more or less functionality than a theoretical regular expression.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: regular expression
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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