"metacharacter" meaning in All languages combined

See metacharacter on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Audio: en-uk-metacharacter.ogg Forms: metacharacters [plural]
Etymology: From meta- + character. Etymology templates: {{prefix|en|meta|character}} meta- + character Head templates: {{en-noun}} metacharacter (plural metacharacters)
  1. (computing) A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard. Wikipedia link: metacharacter Categories (topical): Computing, Regular expressions Related terms: escape character Translations (Translations): metamerkki (Finnish), métacaractère [masculine] (French), Metazeichen [neuter] (German), Funktionszeichen [neuter] (German), μεταχαρακτήρας (metacharaktíras) [feminine] (Greek), فرانویسه (Persian)

Inflected forms

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          "ref": "2005, Andrew Watt, Beginning Regular Expressions, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 73:",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quote"
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          "ref": "[2006, Olav Martin Kvern, David Blatner, Real World Adobe InDesign CS2, Peachpit Press, →ISBN, page 224:",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quote"
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        "A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard."
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      "id": "en-metacharacter-en-noun-TEErG~hc",
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          "computing",
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          "character",
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        [
          "asterisk",
          "asterisk"
        ],
        [
          "wildcard",
          "wildcard"
        ]
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        "(computing) A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "escape character"
        }
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      "topics": [
        "computing",
        "engineering",
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        "natural-sciences",
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      "translations": [
        {
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "Translations",
          "word": "metamerkki"
        },
        {
          "code": "fr",
          "lang": "French",
          "sense": "Translations",
          "tags": [
            "masculine"
          ],
          "word": "métacaractère"
        },
        {
          "code": "de",
          "lang": "German",
          "sense": "Translations",
          "tags": [
            "neuter"
          ],
          "word": "Metazeichen"
        },
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          "code": "de",
          "lang": "German",
          "sense": "Translations",
          "tags": [
            "neuter"
          ],
          "word": "Funktionszeichen"
        },
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          "code": "el",
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          "roman": "metacharaktíras",
          "sense": "Translations",
          "tags": [
            "feminine"
          ],
          "word": "μεταχαρακτήρας"
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          "code": "fa",
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          "sense": "Translations",
          "word": "فرانویسه"
        }
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          "asterisk",
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          "wildcard",
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        "(computing) A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard."
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  "translations": [
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "Translations",
      "word": "metamerkki"
    },
    {
      "code": "fr",
      "lang": "French",
      "sense": "Translations",
      "tags": [
        "masculine"
      ],
      "word": "métacaractère"
    },
    {
      "code": "de",
      "lang": "German",
      "sense": "Translations",
      "tags": [
        "neuter"
      ],
      "word": "Metazeichen"
    },
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      "code": "de",
      "lang": "German",
      "sense": "Translations",
      "tags": [
        "neuter"
      ],
      "word": "Funktionszeichen"
    },
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      "code": "el",
      "lang": "Greek",
      "roman": "metacharaktíras",
      "sense": "Translations",
      "tags": [
        "feminine"
      ],
      "word": "μεταχαρακτήρας"
    },
    {
      "code": "fa",
      "lang": "Persian",
      "sense": "Translations",
      "word": "فرانویسه"
    }
  ],
  "word": "metacharacter"
}

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-09-22 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-09-20 using wiktextract (af5c55c and 66545a6). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.