What are ^.* and .*$ in regular expressions?

Question

Can someone explain the meaning of these characters. I\'ve looked them up but I don\'t seem to get it.

The whole regular expression is:

/^.*(?=.{8,})(?=.         


        

Answer 1

Something else that my help you in the future:

.*$

will match two times given this string : "1"

If you are wondering why, it's because it consumes all characters, but then also matches nothing. So the empty string is also a match.