Some more metacharacters are star and the plus signs.
So star means repeat any number of times, including none of the item.
And plus means at least one of the item.
So here we were searching for something between parenthesis and
it can be any character repeated any number of times.
So that will match everything from something like this where you
have a phrase in between the parenthesis, to something like this where you
just have parenthesis with absolutely nothing in between.
Because the star can include, including no repetition at all.
Remember the plus sign includes at least one of the item.
So, for example, here we're looking for at least one number,
followed by any number of characters, followed by at least one number again.
So here we see one number followed by some large number of characters,
followed by a number, another number again.
We see this again here, and so this allows us to look for any
possible combination of numbers that are separated by something other than numbers.
We can use the curly brackets as interval qualifiers to let us
specify both the minimum and the maximum number of times to match an expression.
So here what we're looking for is Bush, either capital or
lower case, and at the end debate.
And in-between what we're looking for is at least one space,
followed by something that's not a space, followed by at least one space.
And we want to see that between one and five times.
In other words we want to see something like space word space,
up between one and five times.
So that will match all of these because, in this case,
there are five words that occur between Bush and debates.
In this case there are three words that occur between Bush and
debates, and so forth.
So as long as there's between one and five word-like objects between the two,
we'll discover it with this regular expression.
If you use m, n within the curly bracket, that means at least m times, but
not more than n matches.
If you only use one number m, it means exactly that many matches.
If you use m comma, that means at least m matches to that regular expression.