Regular Expression Syntax
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  "Characters" are things you can type.  "Operators" are things in a
regular expression that match one or more characters.  You compose
regular expressions from operators, which in turn you specify using one
or more characters.

  Most characters represent what we call the match-self operator, i.e.,
they match themselves; we call these characters "ordinary".  Other
characters represent either all or parts of fancier operators; e.g.,
`.' represents what we call the match-any-character operator (which, no
surprise, matches (almost) any character); we call these characters
"special".  Two different things determine what characters represent
what operators:

  1. the regular expression syntax your program has told the Regex
     library to recognize, and

  2. the context of the character in the regular expression.

  In the following sections, we describe these things in more detail.

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Syntax Bits

Predefined Syntaxes

Collating Elements vs. Characters

The Backslash Character