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32.8. Regular Expressions: Specifying a Range of Characters with [...]
If you want to match specific characters, you can use square brackets, [ ], to identify the exact characters you are searching for. The pattern that will match any line of text that contains exactly one digit is ^[0123456789]$. This is longer than it has to be. You can use the hyphen between two characters to specify a range: ^[0-9]$. You can intermix explicit characters with character ranges. This pattern will match a single character that is a letter, digit, or underscore: [A-Za-z0-9_]. Character sets can be combined by placing them next to one another. If you wanted to search for a word that:
-
started with an uppercase T,
-
was the first word on a line,
-
had a lowercase letter as its second letter,
-
was three letters long (followed by a space character (
)), and
-
had a lowercase vowel as its third letter,
the regular expression would be:
^T[a-z][aeiou]
To be specific: a range is a contiguous series of characters, from low to high, in the ASCII character set.[101] For example, [z-a] is not a range because it's backwards. The range [A-z] matches both uppercase and lowercase letters, but it also matches the six characters that fall between uppercase and lowercase letters in the ASCII chart: [, \, ], ^, _, and '.
[101]Some languages, notably Java and Perl, do support Unicode regular expressions, but as Unicode generally subsumes the ASCII 7-bit character set, regular expressions written for ASCII will work as well.
-- BB
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| 32.7. Regular Expressions: Match Any Character with . |  | 32.9. Regular Expressions: Exceptions in a Character Set |
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