Regular Expressions: Exceptions in a Character Set (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition) 32.9. Regular Expressions: Exceptions in a Character Set You can easily search for all characters except those in square brackets by putting a caret (^) as the first character after the left square bracket ([). To match all characters except lowercase vowels, use [^aeiou]. Like the anchors in places that can't be considered an anchor, the right square bracket (]) and dash (-) do not have a special meaning if they directly follow a [. Table 32-2 has some examples. Table 32-2. Regular expression character set examples Regular expression Matches [0-9] Any digit [^0-9] Any character other than a digit [-0-9] Any digit or a - [0-9-] Any digit or a - [^-0-9] Any character except a digit or a - [ ]0-9] Any digit or a ] [0-9]] Any digit followed by a ] [0-99-z] Any digit or any character between 9 and z [ ]0-9-] Any digit, a -, or a ] Many languages have adopted the Perl regular expression syntax for ranges; for example, \w is equivalent to "any word character" or [A-Za-z0-9_], while \W matches anything but a word character. See the perlre(1) manual page for more details. -- BB 32.8. Regular Expressions: Specifying a Range of Characters with [...]32.10. Regular Expressions: Repeating Character Sets with * Copyright © 2003 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved.