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Anchors
Anchors
- Regular expressions also take advantage of anchoring
patterns that help match the string in relationship to the
rest of the line. For example, the "\b" anchor is used to
specify a word boundary. That is, "/\beric\b/" matches
"eric", but it does not match "generic".
- Similarly, the caret (^) anchor will match a string to the
beginning of the line. Thus, "/^eric/" will match the
following line
eric is my name
- but it will not match
my name is eric
| Warning: the caret (^) can be confusing since it is used as an anchor when included "outside" of the square brackets ([]) but is used as the "not" operator for a class when used "within". |
- The following table summarizes a few of the most common anchors.
| Anchor | Description |
|---|---|
| ^ | Matches the beginning of the string |
| $ | Matches the end of the string |
| \b | Matches a word boundary (between \w and \W) |
| \B | Matches on non-word boundary |
Additional Resources:
Matching OperatorsTable of Contents
String Modifiers
