6.2.6 The Anchor Characters

Sometimes, we want to apply the regular expression from a defined point. In other words, we want to anchor the regular expression so it is not permitted to match anywhere in the string, just from a certain point.

The anchor operators allow us to do this. When we start a regular expression with a ^, it anchors the regular expression to the beginning of the string. This means that whatever the regular expression starts with must be matched at the beginning of the string. For example, ^aa* will not match strings that contain one or more a's; rather it matches strings that start with one or more a's.

We can also use the $ at the end of the string to anchor the regular expression at the end of the string. If we applied this to our last regular expression, we have ^aa*$ which now matches only those strings that consist of one or more a's. This makes it clear that the regular expression cannot just look anywhere in the string, rather the regular expression must be able to match the entire string exactly, or it will not match at all.

In most cases, you will want to either anchor a regular expression to the start of the string, the end of the string, or both. Using a regular expression without some sort of anchor can also produce confusing and strange results. However, it is occasionally useful.