Understanding the regex [\s\S-[<>]]*

Question

I have this regex: [\\s\\S-[<>]]*

Could you please help me understand what does this expression stand for? From what I see it means a character class formed of spaces and a range from non-space characters to < or >?

It doesn't make much sense..

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is a variant only supported by a few regex engines (.NET, JGSoft, XML Schema and XPath but not for example native Java regex), and it's called character class substraction .

For example,

[A-Z-[EFG]]

matches any letter from A to Z except E , F or G .

But in your case, it really doesn't make much sense because [\\s\\S] matches any character - the same result (in any regex flavor) can be achieved by

[^<>]*