what does regular in regex/“regular expression” me

Question

What does the "regular" in the phrase "regular expression" mean?

I have heard that regexes were regular at one time, but no more

Answer 1

It's signifying that it's a regular language.

Regexes are still popular. Some people frown on them but they remain a quick and easy (if you know how to use them) way of matching certain types of strings. The alternative is often a good few lines of code looping through strings and extracting the bits that you need which is much nastier!

I still use them on a regular (pun fully intended) basis, to give you a use case I used one the other day to match lines of guitar chords as oppose to lyrics. They're also commonly used for things like basic validation of email addresses and the like.

They're certainly not dead.

Answer 2

The regular in regular expression comes from that it matches a regular language.

The concept of regular expressions used in formal language theory is quite different from what engines like PCRE call regular expressions. PCRE and other similar engines have features like lookahead, conditionals and recursion, which make them able to match non-regular languages.

Answer 3

It comes from regular language. This is part of formal language theory. Check out the Chomsky hierarchy for other formal languages.

Answer 4

I think it comes from the term for the class of grammars that regular expressions describe: regular grammars (or "regular" languages). Where that term comes from is likely answered by a trip to Wikipedia.

Modern regex engines that implement all those fancy look-ahead, pattern re-match, and subexpression counting features, well, those are recognizing a class of grammar that's a superset of regular grammars. "Classical" regular expressions correspond in mechanical ways to theoretical machines called "finite automata". That's a really fun subject in and of itself.