Metacharacters

Metacharacters

Metacharacters in regular expressions are called all these weird special characters to regex that mean something specifically to a pattern and cannot be taken as a letter literal. 

We place them always between the two backslashes where we define the body of our pattern. Some of the most common used include: 

\w Which matches any letter or number. It is called word character

\d which matches all digits(numbers)

\s matches a space character

\. matches all letters, digits and special characters (be careful with that!)

\D all non-digit characters

\W matches all non-word characters (everything that is not a letter nor digit)

And many many more, you can find the full list here!