What's the meaning of ^ and $ symbols in regular expression?

Question

What's the meaning of the symbols ^ and $ in regular expression.

For example :

^[SQBM][0-9]{5,6}$

Thanks

See e.g. [Start of String and End of String Anchors](http://www.regular-expressions.info/anchors.html) or read the perlretut [Part 1: The basics: Simple word matching](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html#Simple-word-matching) — stema, Sep 10 '13 at 08:31

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 10 '13 at 08:24

^ is beginning of input and $ is the end of it.

e.g.

And a little bit more detailed description from wiki:

^ Matches the starting position within the string. In line-based tools, it matches the starting position of any line.
$ Matches the ending position of the string or the position just before a string-ending newline. In line-based tools, it matches the ending position of any line.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '13 at 08:24

1

^ - beginning of text

$ - end end of text

answered Sep 10 '13 at 08:24

Marcin Szymczak

2 Answers2