What does the symbol ^ in webmaster|^xoops|^admin? And what is regex enabled?

DutchMan

Both questions are really tied together.

Regular Expressions (or RegEx for short) is a powerful pattern matching language that has been implemented in several programming languages and utilities that work with large amounts of text.

the ^ character indicates that the matched string should be at the beginning of a line and the | character is equivalent to a logical OR.

The listed regular expression matches the following
"webmaster" anywhere in the string OR
"xoops" at the beginning of the string OR
"admin" at the beginning of the string

Regular Expressions can be quite complex, or very simple. They are commonly used for data entry validation tasks like:

ensuring a phone number is written in an appropriate format,
ensuring email addresses are written in a valid syntax,
ensuring proper date formats.

There are many resources available online for working with regular expressions. I have listed a couple of resources below:

Newbie Guide to Regular Expressions
PHP and Regular Expressions 101 (Programming)

Hi there ackbarr,

Thanks for the information and for the links. I will checked them out today!

DutchMan

You can learn by example with the Regular Expression Tester

I have checked out the links and have read and learned a lot about Regex. And the tester seems to be a great tool!

By the way, who can provide me with a list of free email hosts? I don't want them in my user profiles!