Regular expression
A Regular Expression is a type of text string based on a particular pattern that is used to search a set of strings of characters. In short, it is denoted as Regex or Regexp. It is a type of formal language which has a common syntax or pattern that matches for a set of strings. For example, the pattern a|b* will match a set of strings {ε, a, b, bb, bbb, ...}. The syntax rules for a Regex is different in different formalisms and hence there can be a infinite number of regular expressions for a particular set of strings. It is very difficult to explain the concept of Regex without examples. To find more about regular expression, browse our directory for tutorials and examples.