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

^.* //Start of string followed by zero or more of any character (except line break)

.*$ //Zero or more of any character (except line break) followed by end of string

So when you see this...

(?=.*[@#$%^&+=]).*$

It allows any character (except line break) to come between (?=.*[@#$%^&+=]) and the end of the string.

To show that . doesn't match any character, try this:

/./.test('\n');  is false

To actually match any character you need something more like [\s\S].

/[\s\S]/.test('\n') is true