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

• . means "any character".
• * means "any number of this".
• .* therefore means an arbitrary string of arbitrary length.
• ^ indicates the beginning of the string.
• $ indicates the end of the string.

The regular expression says: There may be any number of characters between the expression (?=.{8,})(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[@#$%^&+=]) and the beginning and end of the string that is searched.