Regex Glossary

Browse 3 regex terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

3 Regex Terms

Capture Group
A parenthesized subpattern in a regular expression whose matched text is retained so it can be referenced later by index or name. Capture groups are useful for...
Evil Regex
A regular expression so complex or poorly designed that it is unreadable, fragile, or prone to catastrophic backtracking and performance issues. The term often...
Lookahead
A parsing technique that examines upcoming tokens or characters in the input stream without consuming them, used to make decisions about which grammar rule to...

Related Topics