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I have this regex: [\s\S-[<>]]*
Could you please help me understand what does this expression stand for? From what I see it means a character class formed of spaces and a range from non-space characters to < or >?
It doesn't make much sense..
Thanks!
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Definition and Usage The \s metacharacter matches whitespace character. Whitespace characters can be: A space character.
The Difference Between \s and \s+The plus sign + is a greedy quantifier, which means one or more times. For example, expression X+ matches one or more X characters. Therefore, the regular expression \s matches a single whitespace character, while \s+ will match one or more whitespace characters.
\\s - matches single whitespace character. \\s+ - matches sequence of one or more whitespace characters.
represents a single character (like the regex's . ) while * represents a sequence of zero or more characters (equivalent to regex . * ).
This is a variant only supported by a few regex engines (.NET, JGSoft, XML Schema and XPath but not for example native Java regex), and it's called character class substraction.
For example,
[A-Z-[EFG]]
matches any letter from A to Z except E, F or G.
But in your case, it really doesn't make much sense because [\s\S] matches any character -
the same result (in any regex flavor) can be achieved by
[^<>]*
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