Regex basics

A regular expression is a pattern consisting of literal characters, an exact match, and special characters that have a variety of different behaviors. For example, the dot character, ., matches any single character and not a literal dot.

A few basic characters can go a long way. Several of the most widely used characters and operators introduced in this section are summarized in Table 9.1:

Character	Description	Example
Any, except: [\^$.|?*+()	Literal character	'a' -match 'a'
.	Any single character (except carriage return, line feed, \r, and \n)	'a&apos...