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I have been looking everywhere and I just cannot find anybody looking for the answer. what is the difference between:

'/^a/'

and

'/a.*/'

both of them say: give me everything that starts with 'a'. so what is the difference?

edit: I am not adding the regex tool since i was not trying it out on a specific one.

Nexospex
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    The slhshes are not part of the actual regular expression. Whether `a` means "`a` at beginning of line" or "`a` anywhere on a line" depends on the regex dialect and the host language. Like the [tag:regex] tag guidance already told you when you selected it, you need to specify which regex tool or dialect you are asking about. – tripleee Jul 24 '22 at 17:54
  • "I am not adding the regex tool since i was not trying it out on a specific one." Yes, you were. Regexes are not universal across all tools. Python is not the same as Google Analytics is not the same as Notepad++ is not the same as grep. – Andy Lester Jul 24 '22 at 19:52

2 Answers2

1

/^a/ means "match the beginning of the string, and then the character a".

/a.*/ means "match the character a anywhere in the string, and then 0 or more of any other characters."

/^a/ and /a.*/ both match "apple" but only /a.*/ will match "cat".

Andy Lester
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  • Whether `/a…/` means "anywhere in the string" or not depends also on how the regex is applied on the string – Bergi Jul 24 '22 at 18:51
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/^a/ matches "a" at the beginning of a string, but /a.*/ matches"a" and all following characters.

That means that /^a/ in "abc" matches only "a", but /a.*/ in the same string matches "abc". Hope it helped!

Libertas
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    It's weird to say "marks" when you mean "matches". This seems to pretty much duplicate the earlier answer. – tripleee Jul 24 '22 at 17:55