Introduction

Regular Expressions - User guide

Regular expressions is the term used for a codified method of searching invented or defined by the American mathematician Stephen Kleene.
The syntax (language format) described is compliant with extended regular expressions (EREs) defined in IEEE POSIX 1003.2 (Section 2.8). EREs are now commonly supported by Apache, PHP4, Javascript 1.3+, MS Visual Studio, MS Frontpage, most visual editors, vi, emac, the GNU family of tools (including grep, awk and sed) as well as many others. Extended Regular Expressions (EREs) will support Basic Regular Expressions (BREs are essentially a subset of EREs). Most applications, utilities and laguages that implement RE's extend the capabilities defined. The appropriate documentation should always be consulted.

The Basics

We are going to be using the terms literal, metacharacter, target string, escape sequence and search string in this overview. Here is a definition of our terms:

Literal : A literal is any character we use in a search or matching expression, for example, to find ind in windows the ind is a literal string - each character plays a part in the search, it is literally the string we want to find.

Metacharacter : A metacharacter is one or more special characters that have a unique meaning and are NOT used as literals in the search expression, for example, the character ^ (circumflex or caret) is a metacharacter.

Escape Sequence : An escape sequence is a way of indicating that we want to use one of our metacharacters as a literal. In a regular expression an escape sequence involves placing the metacharacter \ (backslash) in front of the metacharacter that we want to use as a literal, for example, if we want to find ^ind in w^indow then we use the search string \^ind and if we want to find \\file in the string c:\\file then we would need to use the search string \\\\file (each \ we want to search for (a literal) is preceded by an escape sequence \).

Target String : This term describes the string that we will be searching, that is, the string in which we want to find our match or search pattern.

Search Expression : This term describes the expression that we will be using to search our target string, that is, the pattern we use to find what we want.

Our Example Target Strings

Throughout this guide we will use the following as our target strings:

STRING1 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt)
STRING2 Mozilla/4.75 [en](X11;U;Linux2.2.16-22 i586) These are Browser ID Strings and appear as the Apache Environmental variable HTTP_USER_AGENT (full list of Apache environmental variables).