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Regular Expression: Regular Expressions
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-->Regular expressions are patterns used to match character combinations in strings. In JavaScript, regular expressions are ... objects. These patterns are used with the exec and test methods of RegExp, and with the match, replace, search, and split methods of String. This chapter describes JavaScript regular expressions.
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Regular expressions in this sense can express the regular languages, exactly the class of languages accepted by finite state automata. There is... a significant difference in compactness. Some classes of regular languages can only be described by automata that grow exponentially in size, while the length of the required regular expressions only grow linearly. Regular expressions correspond to the type-3 grammars of the Chomsky hierarchy. On the other hand, there is a simple mapping between regular expressions and nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) that does not lead to such a blowup in size; for this reason NFAs are often used as alternative representations of regular expressions.
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The origin of regular expressions lies in automata theory and formal language theory (both part of theoretical computer science). These fields study models of computation (automata) and ways to describe and classify formal languages. A formal language is nothing but a set of strings. In the 1940s, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts described the nervous system by modelling neurons as small simple automata. The mathematician, Stephen Kleene, later described these models using his mathematical notation called regular sets. Ken Thompson built this notation into qed (the predecessor of the Unix ed) and eventually into grep.
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A regular expression, often called a pattern, is an expression that describes a set of strings. They are usually used to give a concise description of a set, without having to list all elements. For example, the set containing the three strings "Handel", "Händel", and "Haendel" can be described by the pattern H(ä|ae?)ndel (or alternatively, it is said that the pattern matches each of the three strings). In most formalisms, if there is any regex that matches a particular set then there is an infinite number of such expressions. Most formalisms provide the following operations to construct regular expressions.
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Regular expressions are very powerful tools for performing pattern matches. PERL programmers and UNIX shell programmers have enjoyed the benefits of regular expressions for years. Once you master the pattern language, most validation tasks become trivial. You can perform complex tasks that once required lengthy procedures with just a few lines of code using regular expressions.
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Regular Expressions are not regular in the sense that there is any common dialect of expression that is understood by all Regex engines. On the contrary, regular expresssions aren't always portable and there are many common, similar but incompatible, dialects in use, such as Perl 5.8, Java.util.regex, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, ECMA Javascript, PCRE, Apache, vi, Shell tools TCL ARE, POSIX BRE, Funduc and JGsoft.
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Regular Expressions