"metacharacter" meaning in English

See metacharacter in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

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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  "etymology_text": "From meta- + character.",
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          "ref": "2005, Andrew Watt, Beginning Regular Expressions, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 73:",
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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.",
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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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        [
          "asterisk",
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        ],
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          "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."
      ],
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        {
          "word": "escape character"
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      "topics": [
        "computing",
        "engineering",
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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"
        },
        {
          "code": "de",
          "lang": "German",
          "sense": "Translations",
          "tags": [
            "neuter"
          ],
          "word": "Funktionszeichen"
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          "sense": "Translations",
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            "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"
    },
    {
      "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 English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-12-21 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-12-04 using wiktextract (d8cb2f3 and 4e554ae). 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.