Digits and Word Characters

Numbers (digits) are represented by the character d, whereas letters (words) are represented by the character w in regular expressions.

Digits

We also use backslashes with \d and \w - this tells the computer you want to use the d and w as part of the regular expression, not as part of the search:

product-\d\.html

will give you

• product-0.html
• product-1.html
• product-2.html
• ...
• product-9.html

Remember that \d is only for a *single* digit, so if you wanted to have longer numbers, you would use this:

product-\d+\.html

This tells a computer to match any digit, at least one digit. So the results from this search would get you

• product-0.html
• product-1.html
• product-2.html
• product-10.html
• product-2450.html
• ...

and so on.

Word Characters

Say you want to target pages with human-readable names that don't use special characters. Maybe these are photo album folders, or documents that your users have created, or product pages that include the name and ID of the product. We can do this easily by using the \w function:

\w+\.php

This will match any file with only word characters (a-z, A-Z and _) in the name. Here are some example files that this regex will match:

• paris.php
• Melbourne.php
• McMurdo_Field_Work_Presentation.php
• premium_plan_2016Sept.php
• loflo_washer_23998.php

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