I have been gradually amping up my understanding/competency with RegExes. One thing I still have not understood is: what are delimiters for?
For example, I use Regex101 a lot, and I noticed that for every flavour it has a list of delimiters for it on the left side of the regex field (the three vertical dots).
For pcre flavour it has //~/@/;/% etc etc.
For .NET it has "/""/"""" etc
But what are they for?
All my searches for this topic have turned up the subject of using a regular expression to delimit a string with a substring.
>Solution :
The delimiter’s role is not to affect how the regex is interpreted in terms of pattern matching. Instead, it provides a way to separate the regex pattern from other parts of the code or terminal tool’s interface, ensuring clarity and adhering to the conventions of the environment in which the regex is used.
When you’re using regular expressions within various programming languages or platforms, there are often conventions or syntax requirements that you need to be aware of.
For example in PHP language that use delimiters, often there’s an opportunity to append modifiers right after the closing delimiter. These modifiers can adjust the behaviour of the regex, such as making it case-insensitive.
preg_match('/[a-z]+/i', $string, $matches);
Regex101 provides a selection of delimiters for the flavor you choose because it wants to give you a representation of how you’d write the regex in the actual programming environment for that flavor.