Regex – Match Any Character(s)

In this Regular expression tutorial, learn to match a single character appearing once, a single character appearing multiple times, or a specific set of characters.

In regular expressions:

• To match any character, use the dot "." pattern.
• To match a single character (or multiple characters) zero or more times, use ".*" pattern.
• To match multiple characters or a given set of characters, use the character classes.

1. Match Any Character

By default, the '.' dot character in a regular expression matches a single character without regard to what character it is. The matched character can be an alphabet, a number or, any special character.

To create more meaningful patterns, we can combine the dot character with other regular expression constructs.

Pattern	Description
. (Dot)	Matches only a single character.
A.B	Matches only a single character at second place in a 3 character long string where the string starts with ‘A’ and ends with ‘B’.

Pattern.compile(".").matcher("a").matches();    //true
Pattern.compile(".").matcher("ab").matches();   //false

Pattern.compile("A.B").matcher("AIB").matches();    //true
Pattern.compile("A.B").matcher("ABI").matches();    //false

Pattern.compile("A[abc]B").matcher("AaB").matches();    //true
Pattern.compile("A[abc]B").matcher("AkB").matches();    //false

2. Match Any Character from the Specified Range

If we want to match a range of characters at any place, we need to use character classes with a hyphen between the ranges. e.g. ‘[a-f]’ will match a single character which can be either of ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’ or ‘f’.

Pattern	Description
[abc]	Matches only a single character from a set of given characters.
[aA]	Matches only a single character ‘a’, case-insensitive.
[a-f]	Matches only a single character in the range from ‘a’ to ‘f’.
[a-z]	Matches only a single lowercase character in the range from ‘a’ to ‘z’.
[A-Z]	Matches only a single uppercase character in the range from ‘A’ to ‘Z’.
[a-zA-Z]	Matches only a single character in the range from ‘a’ to ‘z’, case-insensitive.
[0-9]	Matches only a single number in the range from ‘0’ to ‘9’.

Pattern.compile("[a-f]").matcher("b").matches();	//true
Pattern.compile("[a-f]").matcher("g").matches();	//false

Pattern.compile("[a-zA-Z]").matcher("a").matches();	//true
Pattern.compile("[a-zA-Z]").matcher("B").matches();	//true
Pattern.compile("[a-zA-Z]").matcher("4").matches();	//false

Pattern.compile("[0-9]").matcher("9").matches();	//true
Pattern.compile("[0-9]").matcher("91").matches();	//false

3. Match Any Character: Zero or More Occurrences

The asterisk (*) is used with any regex pattern for matching zero or more occurrences within strings.

Pattern	Description
.*	Matches any number of characters including special characters.
[0-9]*	Matches any number of digits.
[a-zA-Z]*	Matches any number of alphabets.
[a-zA-Z0-9]*	Matches any number of alphanumeric characters.
https?://.*?(?:\s|$)	Matches URLs from Text
\(.*\)	Matches text between parentheses

Pattern.compile(".*").matcher("abcd").matches();                    //true
Pattern.compile("[a-zA-Z]*").matcher("abcd").matches();             //true
Pattern.compile("[0-9]*").matcher("01234").matches();               //true
Pattern.compile("[a-zA-Z0-9]*").matcher("a1b2c3").matches();       //true

Happy Learning !!