Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun computing A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

meta- +‎ character

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word metacharacter.

Examples

  • A metacharacter is just a character with a special meaning.

    Debian GNU/Linux : Guide to Installation and Usage John Goerzen

  • I suspect then the problem is getting it to recognize the right metacharacter (s) for specifying new values.

    ASP.NET Forums Zavod 2009

  • If this modifier is set, a dollar metacharacter in the pattern matches only at the end of the subject string.

    Muti 2009

  • The underscore character is a metacharacter in SQL when used within a LIKE clause - it represents any single character.

    ColdFusion Talk (CF-Talk) Mailing List RSS Feed 2009

  • For now, note that if you want to include a metacharacter as part of your text, it must be either quoted or escaped using a backslash (\) as shown in Listing 4.

    LXer Linux News Ian Shields 2009

  • The underscore character is a metacharacter in SQL when used within a LIKE clause - it represents any single character.

    ColdFusion Talk (CF-Talk) Mailing List RSS Feed 2009

  • If this modifier is set, a dot metacharacter in the pattern matches all characters, including newlines.

    Muti 2009

  • Also in that pattern the s modifier should be unnecessary since the. metacharacter is not used at all.

    phpBB.com 2009

  • Within a pattern, you may designate subpatterns for later reference by enclosing them in parentheses, and you may refer back to the nth subpattern later in the pattern using the metacharacter \

    Netvouz - new bookmarks 2008

  • Any single character matches itself, unless it is a metacharacter with a special meaning described here or above.

    Netvouz - new bookmarks 2008

Comments

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