Regular expression which matches a pattern, or is an empty string

by

To match pattern or an empty string, use

^$|pattern

Explanation

  • ^ and $ are the beginning and end of the string anchors respectively.
  • | is used to denote alternates, e.g. this|that.

References

On \b

\b in most flavor is a “word boundary” anchor. It is a zero-width match, i.e. an empty string, but it only matches those strings at very specific places, namely at the boundaries of a word.

That is, \b is located:

  • Between consecutive \w and \W (either order):
    • i.e. between a word character and a non-word character
  • Between ^ and \w
    • i.e. at the beginning of the string if it starts with \w
  • Between \w and $
    • i.e. at the end of the string if it ends with \w

References

On using regex to match e-mail addresses

This is not trivial depending on specification.

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