ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Using regular expressions
Metasequence Description
\r Matches the return character.
\s Matches any white-space character (a space, tab, newline, or return character).
\S Matches any character other than a white-space character.
\t Matches the tab character.
\unnnn Matches the Unicode character with the character code specified by the hexadecimal number nnnn. For
example, \u263a is the smiley character.
\v Matches a vertical feed character.
\w Matches a word character (AZ–, az–, 0-9, or _). Note that \w does not match non-English characters, such
as é , ñ , or ç .
\W Matches any character other than a word character.
\\xnn Matches the character with the specified ASCII value, as defined by the hexadecimal number nn.
Character classes
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
You use character classes to specify a list of characters to match one position in the regular expression. You define
character classes with square brackets ( [ and ] ). For example, the following regular expression defines a character
class that matches bag, beg, big, bog, or bug:
/b[aeiou]g/
Escape sequences in character classes
Most metacharacters and metasequences that normally have special meanings in a regular expression do not have
those same meanings inside a character class. For example, in a regular expression, the asterisk is used for repetition,
but this is not the case when the asterisk appears in a character class. The following character class matches the asterisk
literally, along with any of the other characters listed:
/[abc*123]/
However, the three characters listed in the following table do function as metacharacters, with special meaning, in
character classes:
Metacharacter Meaning in character classes
] Defines the end of the character class.
- Defines a range of characters (see the following section “Ranges of characters in character classes”).
\ Defines metasequences and undoes the special meaning of metacharacters.
For any of these characters to be recognized as literal characters (without the special metacharacter meaning), you
must precede the character with the backslash escape character. For example, the following regular expression includes
a character class that matches any one of four symbols ($, \, ], or -):
/[$\\\]\-]/
In addition to the metacharacters that retain their special meanings, the following metasequences function as
metasequences within character classes:
Last updated 6/6/2012
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