Question

It’s a simple question I guess 🙂

“bcd” regular expression pattern matches strings like “abcd” and “bcde”
how shall I modify this pattern to make it match only “bcde” pattern (not “abcd”, “1bcd”, “@3bcd”) ?

Answer 1

You can use the ^ anchor to instruct the regex to start matching from the beginning of the string, so ^bcd will match bcd, bcde, bcdef, etc but will not match abcd, bc, etc.

EDIT: I am not sure if you are after this, but, if you want the regex to match exclusively bcde, you will have to use another anchor, this being the $ in conjunction with the ^ anchor, so your regex will now become ^bcde$. This will instruct the regular expression engine to start matching from the first character of the string and stop matching at the end of the string, so the regex ^bcde$ will match just the string bcde, not abcde, bcdeg, abcdef, etc.