Special Characters and Escaping

Now that you’ve met some of the super-powerful characters of Regular Expression Land, you might want to create a regular expression that matches strings that contain those amazing characters, just to show what a huge fan you are. Give it a shot and check out Listing 6.8.

Listing 6.8 Looking for Stars, Plus More

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> var starPattern = /*/;  SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL> var plusPattern = /+/;  SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: /+/: Nothing to repeat

Well, that didn’t go well. The first SyntaxError is pretty mysterious, but the second error is a bit more helpful. Our plusPattern regular expression is invalid because the + has no preceding character that should be repeated. ...

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