Regular Expression Basic Characters

Regular Expressions use punctuation characters to tell the system what to do when looking for something. These characters can call different behaviors, like:

Find a specific character
Look for this particular thing and make sure it's not targeted
Something within this range

By using basic characters in regular expressions, you can:

Achieve a wide range of usability to validate expressions
Keep your code crisp and clean as well as get faster validation of expressions

Here's a list of the things you'll be using most often:

Common Regex Characters

Character Pattern	Name	Description
.	Period	Matches any character
x*	Star/Asterisk	Matches zero or more of the preceding character (in this case, x)
.*	Period-Star	Matches any number of any character (anything, basically!)
x+	Plus	Matches one or more of the preceding characters (in this case, x)
	Backslash	The next character is to be treated differently or "escaped."
x?	Question Mark	Preceding character is optional. Matches zero or one occurrence
d	Escape-d	Matches any single digit (0-9)
w	Escape-w	Matches any word character (letters, numbers, and underscore)
x\|y	Or pipe	Matches x OR y
(hats?\|scar(f\|ves))	Parentheses	Groups specific items together. This example will match `hat, hats, scarf, scarves`
[xyz]	Brackets	Specify ranges of letters and numbers

Please see this Note on Regular Expression Characters for additional information.

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