Meaning – The term pattern matching character, refers to a special character such as an asterisk (*) or a question mark (?) that can be used to represent one or more characters. Any character or set of characters can replace a pattern-matching character.
Pattern matching in computer science is the checking and locating of specific sequences of data of some pattern among raw data or a sequence of tokens. Unlike pattern recognition, the match has to be exact in the case of pattern matching. Pattern matching is one of the most fundamental and important paradigms in several programming languages. Many applications make use of pattern matching as a major part of their tasks.
Example of usage – “Pattern matching, in its classical form, involves the use of one-dimensional string matching. Patterns are either tree structures or sequences. There are different classes of programming languages and machines which make use of pattern matching.”
