I would like to write a regular expression that starts with the string "wp" and ends with the string "php" to locate a file in a directory. How do I do it?
Example file: wp-comments-post.php
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5There ia a good tutorial here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html – Casimir et Hippolyte Aug 02 '13 at 19:02
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Why regex? Wouldn't you rather use globbing when looking for files? – Tim Pietzcker Aug 02 '13 at 19:04
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3How would you do it using globbing? – Ken Shoufer Aug 02 '13 at 20:07
3 Answers
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This should do it for you ^wp.*php$
Matches
wp-comments-post.php
wp.something.php
wp.php
Doesn't match
something-wp.php
wp.php.txt
Syon
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^wp.*\.php$ Should do the trick.
The .* means "any character, repeated 0 or more times". The next . is escaped because it's a special character, and you want a literal period (".php"). Don't forget that if you're typing this in as a literal string in something like C#, Java, etc., you need to escape the backslash because it's a special character in many literal strings.
Michelle
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1This should also work: ^wp.+\.php$ The only difference is the '+', which makes the dot "greedy". – Adam Howell Apr 08 '16 at 03:35
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13@AdamHowell `+` and `*` are both greedy, although greediness doesn't make a difference in this case. The difference is that `*` matches zero or more characters, and the `+` matches one or more characters. So if someone wanted to match "wp.php", they should use `*`; if they specifically wanted to not match that, they should use `+`. – Michelle Apr 11 '16 at 10:34
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Example: ajshdjashdjashdlasdlhdlSTARTasdasdsdaasdENDaknsdklansdlknaldknaaklsdn
1) START\w*END
return: STARTasdasdsdaasdEND - will give you words between START and END
2) START\d*END
return: START12121212END - will give you numbers between START and END
3) START\d*_\d*END
return: START1212_1212END - will give you numbers between START and END having _
Nayan Hodar
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