HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Position
Several metacharacters anchor the regular expression to a particular location in the document without actually
matching anything themselves. These include
^
The beginning of a line.
$
The end of a line.
\b
A word boundary, including a space or line break.
\B
Any location that is not a word boundary.
\A
The beginning of the document.
\z
The end of the document.
\Z
The end of the document, unless the document ends with a line break. In this case, it is the position
immediately before the final line break.
Because HTML is not very line-oriented, we tend not to use
^
and
$
very much. However,
\b
and
\B
are quite
useful, and
\A
,
\Z
, and
\z
sometimes are, too. For example,
\bcat\b
matches the word
cat
but does not match
inside the words
category
,
catheter
, or
abdicate
. (Some GUI tools, including BBEdit but not jEdit, give you an
option to only match entire words. This is essentially the same as putting
\b
before and after your expression.)
Other possible uses include
\
A\s*(<html|<HTML)
Find all documents that start with
<html
or
<HTML
and thus don't have a DOCTYPE declaration or a byte
order mark.
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