10 ms·

Can anyone explain how this regex [- ~] matches ASCII characters ?

• boyter 14y ago
  It's pretty simple. Assuming you know regex... Im going to assume you don't since you are asking. The bracket expression [ ] defines single characters to match, however you can have more then 1 character inside which all will match. [a] matches a [ab] matches either a or b [abc] matches either a or b or c [a-c] matches either a or b or c. The - allows us to define the range. You can just as easily use [abc] but for long sequences such as [a-z] consider it short hand. In this case [ -~] it means every character between <space> and <tilde>, which just happens to be all the ASCII printable characters (see chart in the article). The only bit you need to keep in mind is that <space> is a character as well, and hence you can match on it. You could rewrite the regex like so (note I haven't escaped or anything in this so its probably not valid) [ !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~] but that's not quite as clever or neat.
• mutation 14y ago
  It doesn't. Space is significant here, and if '-' is a the front of the matching character class it matches literal '-'. Your regex '[- ~]' matches either '-' or ' ' or '~'.