CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
Nick Brunt
Nick Brunt

Reputation: 10067

What does [^*] mean?

So [^x] means don't match "x", and x* means match "x" 0 or more times, but what does [^*] mean?

Upvotes: 24

Views: 4110

Answers (4)

Tom
Tom

Reputation: 11

The search engine symbolhound is a good bet for symbol searches like this. Here are the results for [^*] :

[disclosure: on the SH team]

Upvotes: 1

Ahmad Mageed
Ahmad Mageed

Reputation: 96557

It means "match a character that isn't a literal asterisk character."

The thing to keep in mind is that within a character class metacharacters don't need to be escaped, so [^*] is the same as [^\*]. Similarly, you could use [.] to refer to a literal dot rather than the metacharacter referring to any character. Outside of a character class you would need to escape it: \..

Upvotes: 32

Michael Goldshteyn
Michael Goldshteyn

Reputation: 74470

It means a single occurence of a character that is not the actual character *. No escape character is necessary, because the asterisk has no special meaning inside a character class. This should not be very surprising, since the carat character, ^, also has a completely different meaning inside a character class.

Upvotes: 5

rid
rid

Reputation: 63590

* doesn't have special meaning inside a character class, so it means literally "something that's not *". The only characters that have special meaning inside character classes are -, ^ and ]. Other than that everything is taken literally. For example, [^.] means "something that's not .", just as [^$] means "something that's not $".

Upvotes: 5

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