Intro
This module provides regular expression matching operations similar to
those found in Perl. It supports both 8-bit and Unicode strings; both
the pattern and the strings being processed can contain null bytes and
characters outside the US ASCII range.
Regular expressions can contain both special and ordinary characters.
Most ordinary characters, like “A”, “a”, or “0”, are the simplest
regular expressions; they simply match themselves. You can
concatenate ordinary characters, so last matches the string ‘last’.
Special Characters
caution about the "greedy"
The special characters are:
"^" Matches the start of the string.
"$" Matches the end of the string or just before the newline at
the end of the string.
"*" Matches 0 or more (greedy) repetitions of the preceding RE.
Greedy means that it will match as many repetitions as possible.
"+" Matches 1 or more (greedy) repetitions of the preceding RE.
"?" Matches 0 or 1 (greedy) of the preceding RE.
*?,+?,?? Non-greedy versions of the previous three special characters.
{m,n} Matches from m to n repetitions of