Regular expression to match characters at beginning of line only

by

Beginning of line or beginning of string?

Start and end of string

/^CTR.*$/

/ = delimiter
^ = start of string
CTR = literal CTR
$ = end of string
.* = zero or more of any character except newline

Start and end of line

/^CTR.*$/m

/ = delimiter
^ = start of line
CTR = literal CTR
$ = end of line
.* = zero or more of any character except newline
m = enables multi-line mode, this sets regex to treat every line as a string, so ^ and $ will match start and end of line

While in multi-line mode you can still match the start and end of the string with \A\Z permanent anchors

/\ACTR.*\Z/m

\A = means start of string
CTR = literal CTR
.* = zero or more of any character except newline
\Z = end of string
m = enables multi-line mode

As such, another way to match the start of the line would be like this:

/(\A|\r|\n|\r\n)CTR.*/

or

/(^|\r|\n|\r\n)CTR.*/

\r = carriage return / old Mac OS newline
\n = line-feed / Unix/Mac OS X newline
\r\n = windows newline

Note, if you are going to use the backslash \ in some program string that supports escaping, like the php double quotation marks "" then you need to escape them first

so to run \r\nCTR.* you would use it as "\\r\\nCTR.*"

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