Regular expression special characters

Regular expressions have many special characters, which are also known as metacharacters, with special meanings in a regular expression pattern. Some are simple escape sequences, such as, a newline "\n", with the same meaning as the same escape sequence in strings. But, regular expressions have many more special characters that add much power to working with strings and text, much more power than is initially recognized by people being introduced to regular expressions. For anyone who works with strings and text, the effort to become proficient with regular expression parsing is more than worthwhile.

Regular expression summary

Regular expression repetition characters

Regular expression character classes

Regular expression anchor characters

Regular expression reference characters

Regular expression escape sequences

Regular expression replacement characters