Mastering Regular Expresstion notes(1)

一、 metacharacter

1. line head and line end ------- ^, $

2. character class ------ [ ] (match exactly one character)

3. negated character class --------- [^……]

    ep:

grep -e ' q[^u]'     not match "iraq", because 'q[^u]' means q followed by a character that is not u

                         so, there must be a character followed q.

4. any character ---------- dot(.)

    if within character class, the dot doesn't mean any character

5. alternatives ------------ |

   if within character class. it doesn't mean it

6. word starting and word ending --------- \<, \>

7. optional item ------ ? (zero or one character)

8.  repetition 

       + --------------- one or as many times as possible

       * --------------- none, one or as many times as possible

9. defined range of matches: intervals -------------- {n, m}

10. parenthese and backrefference

     ep:  egrep -i "([a-z])([0-9])\1\2 "  files

               \1------------ mean [a-z]

               \2------------ mean [0-9]

summary: