Regex Literal Characters

In this article you will learn about literal character match in regular expressions. What is search pattern for literals and how a group of literals is matched.

The simplest match in Regex is a literal match. And out of these literal matches is a single character literal match. Literal means what it appears to be or just take the meaning of apparent character or group of characters. 

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A literal match can be either single character, two characters or more. If there are more than one character then it is usually a word. A word need not be meaningful, like if you want to match car, it is a proper word with some meaning however lets say a group of words razcyl now this doesn't have some meaning or proper word, however you will be able to match it. Regex is not a language expert. It is based on characters and combination of characters.  

When you try to match a literal character the regex engine matches the first occurence of that character in the string and returns a match in standard mode. However, in global mode it will match all the occurences of the literal character or group of characters. Important thing to note is that regex engine starts matching from left to right. If it finds the character to match at the first position in the string, it will stop the search and return the results even if the string consists of hundreds or thousands of lines. It will simply match the first occurence and then will stop searching.

Lets say you want to match the first alphabet of English Language a in a test string.
This is my car. I like it very much.

When the regex engine runs, it will match a in the word car. Now a is in the center of word car but it does not matter to regex. If you want to match a single character, as a standalone match you will have to use word boundaries by applying \b before and after the character you want to match.

Literal Character Search Pattern:

A little explanation of how regex works: If the literal character is a which you want to search in text string

This is my car. I like it very much.

The regex engine starts with checking or matching the first character in the string from left. It checks the first character which is T a capital T in the word This. Ofcourse this is not a match. Now the regex engine moves to next character which is h. Again it is not a match and the regex engine proceeds to next character i, still no match it moves to next character which is s and no match. Regex engine keeps on searching all through the string. After the word s there is space. A space is called white character and it is treated like any other character in regular expressions, this is not a match and regex engine moves to i,s, space,m,y,space and c. After c it moves further in the left direction and finds the character a and wow! here is the match. The regex engine happily reports there is a match of your literal character a. Regex engine usually also reports the position of match. After this match the engine ignores all the remaining test string. This is how a regex engine works, character by character from left to right.

You can make a regex engine to search further, for a, in the string. But this is usually done with global mode or some code in the specific programming language usually known as the flavor of regex in which you are working. You would be aware of search next in text editors.

Group of Literal Characters Search:

If you want to match a group of characters instead of a single character the regex engine will do it for you. Lets say you want to match car in the string. Now the regex engine first will search for c in the string. It will not search for whole word car, but will start with the first character out of group of characters. It will keep looking for c in the test string and when it will find c, it will check the next character a i.e. if c is immediately followed by a. If c is followed by a it will say ok and search for next character r. In case c is not followed by a, it will move further and again start searching for c again. If c is immediately followed by a then it will check if a is immediately followed by r. If a is note followed by r, the regex engine will move in the right direction and will start searching for c again. In case a is followed by r the engine will declare it a full match and will stop its search and will not proceed towards right in the string.  Hence car means match c, which is immediately followed by a, which is immediately followed by r. If these three conditions are met only in that case it is a complete match. Now for global mode the regex will search for all occurences of car in the test string. But the search for each occurence of car will be same as described here and search for each character will be same as discussed earlier.

One thing to note here is that a literal search is case sensitive. car will match car only and it will not match Car. You can make car to match Car or caR or cAr or CAR by simply using case insensitive flag in regex but by default a regex search is case sensitive.

For characters from other languages, either you can write the characters and they will just work for any English alphabets or you may use  unicode in your regex for sepecial characters.

Here are some examples of literal character matches.

Regex pattern: / e /
Test string: This is my pen.

e will match e in the word pen here

Regex pattern: / i /
Test string: Here is a list of things for election.

i will match first occurence of i, that is in is

Regex pattern: / car /
Test string: This is my car. I like this car. A car is for transportation.

car will match first occurence of car after word my


Now I hope you know what are literal characters in regex. How a single or a group of literal characters are matched how a regular expression engine works. These things might seem trivial but they are very important in setting the foundation of regex. Complex regex patterns are simply made from these simple characters.