regular expression

A concise description of a regular formal language with notations for concatenation, alternation, and iteration (repetition) of subexpressions.

Noun

  1. A concise description of a regular formal language with notations for concatenation, alternation, and iteration (repetition) of subexpressions.
  2. Any pattern for text matching or searching, frequently offering more or less functionality than a theoretical regular expression.

Forms

regular expressions

Synonyms

regex regexp

Derived

grep PCRE re regex regexp