Dictionary

metacharacter en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (UK) audio

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *me Proto-Indo-European *meth₂? Ancient Greek μετᾰ́ (metắ) Ancient Greek μετᾰ- (metă-)lbor. English meta- Ancient Greek χαράσσω (kharássō) Proto-Indo-European *-tḗr Proto-Hellenic *-tḗr Ancient Greek -τήρ (-tḗr) Ancient Greek χαρακτήρ (kharaktḗr)der. Latin charactērder. Old French caracterebor. Middle English caracter English character English metacharacter From meta- + character.

Meanings

1. A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard.
   • You can't enter invisible characters—such as tab characters, line-end characters, or carriage returns—in the Find What or Change To fields. To get around this, you enter codes—known as “metacharacters”—representing those characters. [2006, Olav Martin Kvern, David Blatner, Real World Adobe InDesign CS2, Peachpit Press, →ISBN, page 224:
   • This chapter moves on to look at several regular expression metacharacters and modifiers. Metacharacters can be combined with literal characters and quantifiers, which were discussed in Chapter 3, to create more complex regular expression patterns. 2005, Andrew Watt, Beginning Regular Expressions, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 73:

Forms

Relateds

escape character

Translations (6)

fi metamerkki (Translations) · fr métacaractère (Translations) · de Funktionszeichen (Translations) · fa فرانویسه (Translations) · el μεταχαρακτήρας (Translations) · de Metazeichen (Translations)