Metacharacters

A regular expression is defined using only two types of characters:

1. literals which match themself (eg the pattern "f" will match only "f")

2. metacharacters which have properties that allow a wide variety of disparate characters to be identified.

Combining literals with metacharacters allows patterns of text to be created that can describe a wide class of strings.

The following pages describe the metacharacters supported by the Regex extension for Frontier.

Anchors

 
Stuck on a point

Character Classes

 
Matching any one of several characters

Frontier Constants

 
Write it down quickly!

Quantifiers

 
If matching one is good - matching more must be better

Alternation

 
Match one of several patterns

Grouping

 
Picking up the bits and pieces