Regular Expression Syntax

Regular expressions or regex are sequences of characters that define a pattern.

There are two types of regular expressions: regex (OS_Regex) and sregex (OS_Match).

Regex (OS_Regex) syntax

This is a fast and simple library for regular expressions in C.

This library is designed to be simple while still supporting the most common regular expressions.

Supported expressions

Expressions

Valid characters

\w

A-Z, a-z, 0-9, '-', '@', '_' characters

\d

0-9 character

\s

Spaces " "

\t

Tabs

\p

()*+,-.:;<=>?[]!"'#$%&|{}

\W

Anything not w

\D

Anything not d

\S

Anything not s

\\.

Anything

Modifiers

Expressions

Actions

+

To match one or more times

*

To match zero or more times

Special characters

Expressions

Actions

^

To specify the beginning of the text

$

To specify the end of the text

|

To create a logical or between multiple patterns

Characters escaping

To utilize the following characters they must be escaped with: \

$

(

)

\

|

<

\$

\(

\)

\ \

\|

\<

Limitations

  • The * and + modifiers can only be applied to backslash expressions, not bare characters (e.g. \d+ is supported, 0+ is not)

  • You cannot use alternation in a group, e.g. (foo|bar) is not permitted

  • Complex backtracking is not supported, e.g. \p*\d*\s*\w*: does not match a single colon, because \p* consumes the colon

  • . matches a literal dot, whereas \. matches any character

  • \s matches only an ASCII space (32), not other whitespace like tab

  • there is no syntax to match a literal caret, asterisk or plus (although \p will match asterisk or plus, along with some other characters)

Sregex (OS_Match) syntax

This is faster than OS_Regex, but only supports simple string matching and the following special characters.

Special characters

Expressions

Actions

^

To specify the beginning of the text

$

To specify the end of the text

|

To create a logic: or, between multiple patterns

!

To negate the expression