CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
supportpb
supportpb

Reputation: 49

what does forward slash in regex means

I have the following regular expression which I am analyzing from last few days.

/8c/4!n1!x4!n

Can anyone tell what does the forward slash mean in this regex.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 17869

Answers (2)

Jacron Pagel
Jacron Pagel

Reputation: 21

That's not a regex, although it is similar; it is a SWIFT financial message field format definition.

See for example page 8 of https://www2.swift.com/uhbonline/books/public/en_uk/stdsdkug_20090925/stds_dev_kit_user_guide.pdf

A rough translation might be literal character "/", followed by up to 8 alphabetic chars, followed by a "/", then exactly 4 numeric, exactly 1 alphanumeric, and exactly 4 numeric chars. The "!" denotes "Exactly".

Upvotes: 2

tripleee
tripleee

Reputation: 189926

Without any context such as a particular programming language's conventions, a forward slash in a regex has no special meaning; it simply matches a literal forward slash.

In some languages, such as sed, Awk, Perl, and PHP, slashes are used around regular expressions in some contexts.

/foo/n

This sed script, for example, selects the n (next line) action if the current pattern space contains text which matches the regular expression foo. As you can see, the slashes are used to bracket the regular expression.

As an aside, in sed and Perl (and PHP?) the slash character is simply the default, and you can switch to a different nonalphabetic delimiter if you like.

Upvotes: 7

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