Wildcard Character
Explore how wildcard characters enhance pattern matching in regular expressions by allowing single-character substitutions. Understand when and how to use the period character to efficiently match multiple text patterns and avoid repetitive regex writing. Gain insights into the benefits and limitations of wildcard usage in regex.
Meta-characters are characters that have a special meaning, unlike literal characters.
What is a wildcard character?
You have learned about literal matching. Suppose you need to find instances of “bob”, “bot”, “box” in a text and replace them all with “boy”.
To solve this, you can write three RegEx and replace the result of each one with the required text.
But wait, for now, it is only three texts. Suppose you have ten texts that need replacing. Or 20! Or a 100! Writing a RegEx and replacing for each word and replacing them one by one would be incredibly tedious. In this instance, we would use a wildcard character.
Usage of wildcard character
To solve the above-mentioned problem, RegEx has ...