what does regular in regex/“regular expression” mean?
What does the "regular" in the phrase "regular expression" mean? I have heard that regexes were regular at one time, but no more The regular in regular expression comes from that it matches a regular language . The concept of regular expressions used in formal language theory is quite different from what engines like PCRE call regular expressions. PCRE and other similar engines have features like lookahead , conditionals and recursion , which make them able to match non-regular languages. It comes from regular language. This is part of formal language theory. Check out the Chomsky hierarchy