What does the dot in regex “^[A-Za-z]{2}[1-9]{2}.*” do?

Question

I am very new with regexp. I would like to know the pattern defined by this regexp :

^[A-Za-z]{2}[1-9]{2}.*

It starts with 2 alphabetic characters then 2 numeric characters then a . and * which is for 0 or several occurences of the last characters.

What I don't understand is what is the dot used for?

Answer 1

You should refer to this

^[A-Za-z]{2}[1-9]{2}.*

Debuggex Demo

It's gold mine when it comes to explain regexp. ^ stands for beginning of the line
[A-Z a-z] stands for any letter in the alphabet upper or lower case
[1-9] stands for a number between 1 and 9 included
. as mention stands for any char except end of line depending of your regexp engine

Then you need to read the graph from left to right and respect the loops indication to understand what matches and what not matches.

Answer 2

^ indicates the beginning of line; followed by two alphabetic characters (uppercase or lowercase), followed by two numeric characters in the range 1-9, followed by any number of characters.

Answer 3

. matches any single character in regex

Please refer this