>>38703*reg*ular *ex*pression
essental, its special characters that tell tools to act differently.
If you used soybooru with something like edit*, so it includes "edit", "edits", and "edit_(tiktok)", thats regex
it originated from ed (the standard text editor) in 1969, and its widely used now, its in the name of "grep" (g/*re*/p)
you should ask an AI about it if you want more details