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Regular expression
In
theoretical computer science
and
formal language theory
, a
regular expression
(sometimes called a
rational expression
) is a sequence of
characters
that define a search pattern, mainly for use in
pattern matching
with
strings
, or
string matching
, i.e. "find and replace"-like operations. The concept arose in the 1950s, when the American mathematician
Stephen Kleene
formalized the description of a
regular language
, and came into common use with the
Unix
text processing utilities
ed
, an editor, and
grep
, a
filter
.
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