Metacharacter

Quick meaning: Metacharacter is a noun meaning (computing) A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard.

Meaning

(computing) A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard.

Example Sentences

You can't enter invisible characters—such as tab characters, line-end characters, or carriage returns—in the Find What or Change To fields. To get around this, you enter codes—known as “metacharacters”—representing those characters.

This chapter moves on to look at several regular expression metacharacters and modifiers. Metacharacters can be combined with literal characters and quantifiers, which were discussed in Chapter 3, to create more complex regular expression patterns.

Word Forms

• metacharacters

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include char, charstring, reference, character, pseudocharacter, charakter.

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