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Where does the regex engine start in regex?


Asked by Beau Todd on Dec 10, 2021 FAQ



The regex engine starts at the first token in the regex, G, and at the first character in the string, S. The match fails. However, the regex engine studied the entire regular expression before starting. So it knows that this regular expression uses alternation, and that the entire regex has not failed yet.
Furthermore,
When applying a regex to a string, the engine starts at the first character of the string. It tries all possible permutations of the regular expression at the first character. Only if all possibilities have been tried and found to fail, does the engine continue with the second character in the text.
Also, Since the previous token was zero-length, the regex engine does not advance to the next character in the string. It remains at 7. 4 is a literal character, which does not match 7. There are no other permutations of the regex, so the engine starts again with the first regex token, at the next character: 4.
Next,
While there are many implementations of regular expressions that differ sometimes slightly and sometimes significantly in syntax and behavior, there are basically only two kinds of regular expression engines: text-directed engines, and regex-directed engines.
In fact,
2. Regex patterns to match start of line Description Matching Pattern Line starts with number “^\d” or “^ [0-9]” Line starts with character “^ [a-z]” or “^ [A-Z]” Line starts with character (case-insensi ... ^ [a-zA-Z] Line starts with word “^word” 1 more rows ...