Many characters - all letters, all digits, and many of the special symbols match literally. So if I write

      if ($p =~ /cat/) ....

(example is in Perl), I will have a succesful match if my variable $p contains the word cat. So each of the following will match

      The cat sat on the mat
      cat
      cats, dogs and hamsters are popular animals to keep as pets
      Concatenation is used to join strings together

but it will fail to match

      there is nothing in here that will match c-a-t
      The Cat sat on the mat

If you want to check whether an incoming string starts with something (or ends with something), you can use an anchor - ^ for start and $ for end, and there are also other assertions (such as \b for word boundary) in some regular expression handlers. So if I write

      if ($p =~ /^cat/) ....

(example is in Perl), I will have a succesful match is my variable $p starts with the word cat. So each of the following will match

      cat
      cats, dogs and hamsters are popular animals to keep as pets

but it will fail to match

      Concatenation is used to join strings together
      The cat sat on the mat
      there is nothing in here that will match c-a-t
      The Cat sat on the mat

In a character group, you can specify a list of possibilities to match against one character in the incoming string - for example [abcd] will look for either an a or a b or a c or a d. There are many short cust to specify groups without having to list all the charcacters, but this is one of the areas that regular expression engines differ from each other. If I write

      if ($p =~ /[csm]at/) ....

(example is in Perl), I will have a succesful match is my variable $p contains the string cat sat or mat. So each of the following will match

      cat
      cats, dogs and hamsters are popular animals to keep as pets
      Concatenation is used to join strings together
      The cat sat on the mat
      The Cat sat on the mat

but it will fail to match

      there is nothing in here that will match c-a-t

If you want to match an element of a regular expression a number of times, you can follow it with a count character- the two that are always available are a ? for 0 or 1, and a * for 0 or more. If I write

      if ($p =~ /c-?a-?t/) ....

(example is in Perl), I will have a succesful match is my variable $p contains the string cat, perhaps with a - sign between the c and a and perhaps another between the a and t. So each of the following will match

      cat
      cats, dogs and hamsters are popular animals to keep as pets
      Concatenation is used to join strings together
      The cat sat on the mat
      there is nothing in here that will match c-a-t

but it will fail to match

      The Cat sat on the mat

Regular expressions can commonly (but not always - it depends on the language) include alternations - a | to say "or", and brackets to group together sections of a regular expression so that counts can be applied. You'll also find that the brackets often "capture" the part of the incoming string enclosed in the brackets for later use in the program.

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