What is the meaning of + in a regex?

Question

What does the plus symbol in regex mean?

Solution 1

+ can actually have two meanings, depending on context.

Like the other answers mentioned, + usually is a repetition operator, and causes the preceding token to repeat one or more times. a+ would be expressed as aa* in formal language theory, and could also be expressed as a{1,} (match a minimum of 1 times and a maximum of infinite times).

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However, + can also make other quantifiers possessive if it follows a repetition operator (ie ?+, *+, ++ or {m,n}+). A possessive quantifier is an advanced feature of some regex flavours (PCRE, Java and the JGsoft engine) which tells the engine not to backtrack once a match has been made.

To understand how this works, we need to understand two concepts of regex engines: greediness and backtracking. Greediness means that in general regexes will try to consume as many characters as they can. Let's say our pattern is .* (the dot is a special construct in regexes which means any character¹; the star means match zero or more times), and your target is aaaaaaaab. The entire string will be consumed, because the entire string is the longest match that satisfies the pattern.

However, let's say we change the pattern to .*b. Now, when the regex engine tries to match against aaaaaaaab, the .* will again consume the entire string. However, since the engine will have reached the end of the string and the pattern is not yet satisfied (the .* consumed everything but the pattern still has to match b afterwards), it will backtrack, one character at a time, and try to match b. The first backtrack will make the .* consume aaaaaaaa, and then b can consume b, and the pattern succeeds.

Possessive quantifiers are also greedy, but as mentioned, once they return a match, the engine can no longer backtrack past that point. So if we change our pattern to .*+b (match any character zero or more times, possessively, followed by a b), and try to match aaaaaaaab, again the .* will consume the whole string, but then since it is possessive, backtracking information is discarded, and the b cannot be matched so the pattern fails.

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^{1 In most engines, the dot will not match a newline character, unless the /s ("singleline" or "dotall") modifier is specified.}

Solution 2

In most implementations + means "one or more".

In some theoretical writings + is used to mean "or" (most implementations use the | symbol for that).

Solution 3

1 or more of previous expression.

[0-9]+

Would match:

1234567890

In:

I have 1234567890 dollars

Solution 4

One or more occurences of the preceding symbols.

E.g. a+ means the letter a one or more times. Thus, a matches a, aa, aaaaaa but not an empty string.

If you know what the asterisk (*) means, then you can express (exp)+ as (exp)(exp)*, where (exp) is any regular expression.

Solution 5

A lot depends on where + symbol appears and what the regex flavor is.

In posix-bre and vim (in a non-very magic mode) flavor, + matches a literal + char. E.g. sed 's/+//g' file > newfile removes all + chars in file. If you want to use + as a quantifier here, use \+ (supported in GNU tools), or replace with \{1,\} or double the quantified pattern and remove the quantifier from the first part and add * (zero or more occurrences quantifier) after the other (e.g. sed 's/c++*//' removes c followed with one or more + chars).

In posix-ere and other regex flavors, outside a character class ([...]), + acts as a quantifier meaning "one or more, but as many as possible, occurrences of the quantified pattern*. E.g. in javascript, s.replace(/\++/g, '-') will replace a string like ++++ with a single -. Note that in NFA regex flavors + has a lazy counterpart, +?, that matches "one or more, but as few as possible, occurrences of the quantified pattern".

Inside a character class, the + char is treated as a literal char, in every regex flavor. [+] always matches a single + literal char. E.g. in c#, Regex.Replace("1+2=3", @"[+]", "-") will result in 1-2=3. Note it is not a good idea to use a single char inside a character class, only use a character class for two or more chars, or for charsets. E.g. [+0-9] matches a + or any ASCII digit chars. In php, preg_replace('~[\s+]+~', '-', '1 2+++3') will result in 1-2-3 since the regex matches one or more (due to last + that is a quantifier) whitespaces (\s) or plus chars (+ insdide the character class).

The + symbol can also be a part of the possessive quantifier in some PCRE-like regex flavors (php, ruby, java, boost, icu, etc (but no in python re, .net, javascript). E.g. C\+++(?!\d) in php PCRE would match C and then one or more + symbols (\+ - a literal + and ++ one more occurrences with allowing to backtrack into this quantified pattern) not followed with a digit. If there is a digit after plus chars the whole match fails. Other examples: a?+ (one or zero a chars), a{1,3}+ (one to three a chars as many as possible), a{3}+ (=a{3}, three as), a*+ matches zero or more a chars.

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Comments

[kennytm]

Can you please post a sample?

[Déjà vu]

/s+a+m+p+l+e+/

[NoodleOfDeath]

^^ matches sample, samplee, and sssaaaaaammmppplllllle but not smple

[Tim Pietzcker]

+1; possessive quantifiers only work in Java, PCRE, or the JGSoft regex engine, though. Ruby, Perl, and .NET use atomic groups (?>.*).

[Bruce]

@Tim I alluded to that, but I've now made it more explicit in my answer.

[ninjalj]

@Tim: Perl does support possesive quantifiers, probably since 5.10

[Tim Pietzcker]

@ninjalj: Thanks for the info. It appears that this comparison is not up to date anymore, then.

[realnsleo]

Awesome answer! Really helped me understand the + alot. Thank you.