Using Java as a regular expression flavor, in this chapter, we will go a bit deeper and learn in detail about anchors, quantifiers, boundary matchers, all the available character classes, negated character classes, predefined character classes, and character classes escaping rules, using Java as a reference point. You will also learn Unicode text matching, using regular expressions in Java. We will also cover greedy versus non-greedy (lazy matching) and the change of regular expression behavior with lazy matching.
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
- Anchors and quantifiers
- Boundary matchers
- Character classes
- Regex escaping rules
- Escaping inside character classes
- Negated character classes
- Predefined character classes
- Unicode characters matching
- Greedy quantifiers
- Lazy quantifiers
- Possessive quantifiers...
