In this lesson, we'll look at character classes.
A character class is a special designation that specifies a search for any character from a particular set.
Let's look at a simple example of how character classes work. Suppose we only need to find letters from the alphabet. To do this, you can use character classes, which are described in square brackets, in our case that's the English alphabet: [a-z]. We can see that all alphabetical characters in the string are highlighted:
/[a-z]/
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You can search for numbers from zero to nine in the same way:
/[0-9]/
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And in this example, we'll specify just 2 characters, each of which will be found:
/[aj]/
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With character classes, you can use a mechanism called negation. If we put the character ^ before the first character in square brackets, the search will be inverted and all the characters will be found except those listed after ^:
/[^aj]/
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If you need to find a hyphen as well as letters from the alphabet, then you just need to enter it at the beginning or end of a group of characters; that way it won't be perceived as a special character:
/[aj-]/
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Regular expressions often use special predefined character classes. They're written using the \ and have their own designations in the regular expression language. In the last lesson we used \ as an escape character. Here it's also used as part of the notation. Let's find all the digits in the text using \d:
/\d/
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If we specify a large D, the search will retrieve all other characters, including whitespace and tabs.
/\D/
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There's also the \s, class \S, which is used to search for whitespace characters, and “\S”, in turn, represents all non-whitespace characters. As we can see, the principle of character classes is simple: a lowercase letter denotes a class, and an upper case letter denotes everything that doesn't belong to it.
There's another popular class \w, which includes all letters of the alphabet, all numbers and underscores. The code below doesn't show it, but whitespace characters don't correspond to this class, nor does -.
/\w/
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\w is equivalent to this notation: [0-9a-zA-Z_]. Note that searches in character ranges are case-sensitive, so in this entry a-z followed by A-Z.
Accordingly, \W finds the opposite of \w. Here, hyphens and whitespace characters will be found:
/\W/
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Are there any more questions? Ask them in the Discussion section.
The Hexlet support team or other students will answer you.
About Hexlet learning process
- Article “How to Learn and Cope with Negative Thoughts“
- Article “Learning Traps“
- Article “Complex and simple programming tasks“
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