quote:
Originally posted by J-Thread
Yes, if you know some regular expressions, you can easily see that. The ^ stands for the beginning of the name, and the $ for the end. So to be able to find a match, there have to be a certain number (0 or more) characters (any characters you like) at the beginning of the string, then ASCII character 160 (\xA0), then a {, then 1 or more characters, then a } and that must be the end of the string. Exactly what you would do when you had to describe the process of finding the personal message in english.
That's still not a complete explanation: the * operator is greedy, and will match as many characters as possible. This way, no matter how many '\xA0{'s there are, .* will skip all but the last.