Definition: Pattern matching

Pattern matching is the process of checking whether a specific sequence of characters/tokens/data exists among the given data.

Regular programming languages make use of regular expressions (regex) for pattern matching.

Pattern matching is used to determine whether source files of high-level languages are syntactically correct. It is also used to find and replace a matching pattern in a text or code with another text/code. Any application that supports search functionality uses pattern matching in one way or another.