extremely brief regex overview


Regexes are powerful. Gitolite uses that power as much as it can. If you can't handle that power, hire someone who can and become a manager ;-)

That said, here's a very quick overview of the highlights.

^ and $ are called "anchors". They anchor the match to the beginning and end of the string respectively.

^foo    matches any string starting with 'foo'
foo$    matches any string ending with 'foo'
^foo$   matches exact string 'foo'.

To be precise, the last one is "any string starting and ending with the same 'foo'"; "foofoo" does not match.

[0-9] is an example of a character class; it matches any single digit. [a-z] matches any lower case alpha, and [0-9a-f] is the range of hex characters. You should now guess what [a-zA-Z0-9_] does.

. (the period) is special -- it matches any character. If you want to match an actual period, you need to say \..

*, ?, and + are quantifiers. They apply to the previous token. a* means "zero or more 'a' characters". Similarly a+ means "one or more", and a? means "zero or one".

As a result, .* means "any number (including zero) of any character".

The previous token need not be a single character; you can use parens to make it longer. (foo)+ matches one or more "foo", (like "foo", "foofoo", "foofoofoo", etc.)