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Anchors
Anchors
- Regular expressions also take advantage of anchoring
patterns that help match the string in relationship to the
rest of the line. For example, the "\b" anchor is used to
specify a word boundary. That is, "/\beric\b/" matches
"eric", but it does not match "generic".
- Similarly, the caret (^) anchor will match a string to the
beginning of the line. Thus, "/^eric/" will match the
following line
eric is my name
- but it will not match
my name is eric
| Warning: the caret (^) can be confusing since
it is used as an anchor when included "outside" of
the square brackets ([]) but is used as the "not"
operator for a class when used "within". |
- The following table summarizes a few of the most common
anchors.
| Anchor |
Description |
| ^ |
Matches the beginning of the string |
| $ |
Matches the end of the string |
| \b |
Matches a word boundary (between \w and \W) |
| \B |
Matches on non-word boundary |
Additional Resources:
Matching Operators
Table of Contents
String Modifiers
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