Regular Expressions
A regular expression is a notation for defining all the valid strings of a formal language.
Contents
Examples of Regular Expression Notation
| Regular Expression | Meaning |
|---|---|
| a | Matches a string consisting of just the symbol a |
| b | Matches a string consisting of just the symbol b |
| ab | Matches a string consisting of the symbol a followed by the symbol b |
| a* | Matches a string consisting of zero or more a’s |
| a+ | Matches a string consisting of one or more a’s |
| abb? | Matches the string ab or the string abb. The ? symbol indicates zero or one of the preceding element |
| a|b | Matches a string consisting of the symbol a or the symbol b |
Precedence Rules
When using regular expressions, the rules of arithmetic precedence are as follows:
+ and * are done first
Concatenation (ie joining elements together) is done next
| comes last
More Examples
Examples of regular expressions using the alphabet {a, b, c}
- abc defines the language with only the string ‘abc’
- abc | cba defines the language with two strings’ abc’ and ‘cba’
- (a | b) c (a | b) gives four strings: ‘aca’, ‘acb’, ‘bca’, ‘bcb’
- a+ gives an infinite number of strings: ‘a’, ‘aa’, ‘aaa’, etc
- ab* gives an infinite number of strings: ‘a’, ‘ab’, ‘abb’, ‘abbb’, etc
- (ab)* gives an infinite number of strings: ‘’, ‘ab’, ‘abab’, ‘ababab’, etc
- (a | c)+ gives all possible strings of a and c (not including the empty string)
Regular expression meta-characters
| Symbol | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| │ | Used to separate alternatives | a│b (Means a or b) |
| ? | Used to denote zero or one of the preceding element | a? (0 or 1 as; matches with ‘’ & ‘a’) |
| * | Used to denote zero or more of the preceding element | a* (0 or more as; matches with ‘’, ‘a’, ‘aa’, etc.) |
| ( ) | Used to group characters together, to indicate the scope of another operator | (ab)* (Example 0 or more abs; matches with ‘’, ‘ab’, ‘abab’, etc. |
| [ ] | Another way of denoting alternatives (instead of vertical bar). Defines a character class | [ab] (means a or b) |
| \ | The escape character (this turns the metacharacter into an ordinary character) | a\* (the a character followed by the * character. Note: \ is needed as a* would mean zero or more as.) |
| ^ | Used to indicate the negation of a character class. Also used to match the position before the first character in a string | a[^bc] (a followed by a character that is not a b or c) ^abc will match with abc only if it is at the beginning of a string |
| $ | Used to match with the position after the last character in a string | abc$ (will match with abc only if it is at the end of a string) |
| . | Matches with any single character | a.a (will match with any string that has an a followed by any character followed by an a e.g. ‘aca’, ‘aba’) |
| - | Used to specify a range of values in a character class | [A-Z] (character in the range of A to Z) |
