late 2010s, several companies started to offer hardware, FPGA, GPU implementations of PCRE compatible regex engines that are faster compared to CPU implementations. Patterns The phrase regular expressions, or regexes, is often used to mean the specific, standard textual syntax for representing patterns for matching text, as distinct from the mathematical notation described below. Each character in a regular expression (that is, each character in the string describing its pattern) is either a metacharacter, having a special meaning, or a regular character that has a literal meaning. For example, in the regex b., 'b' is a literal character that matches just 'b', while '.' is a metacharacter that matches every character except a newline. Therefore, this regex matches, for example, 'b%', or 'bx', or 'b5'. Together, metacharacters and literal characters can be used to identify text of a given pattern or process a number of instances of it. Pattern matches may vary from a precise equality to a very general similarity, as controlled by the metacharacters. For example, . is a very general pattern, [a-z] (match all lower case letters from 'a' to 'z') is less general and b is a precise pattern (matches just 'b'). The metacharacter syntax is designed specifically to represent prescribed targets in a concise and flexible way to direct the automation of text processing of a variety of input data, in a form easy to type using a standard ASCII keyboard. A very simple case of a regular expression in this syntax is to locate a word spelled two different ways in a text editor, the regular expression seriali[sz]e matches both "serialise" and "serialize". Wildcard characters also achieve this, but are more limited in what they can pattern, as they have fewer metacharacters and a simple language-base. The usual context of wildcard characters is in globbing similar names in a list of files, whereas regexes are usually employed in applications that pattern-match text strings in general. For example, the regex ^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$ matches excess whitespace at the beginning or end of a line. An advanced regular expression that matches any numeral is [+-]?(\d+(\.\d*)?|\.\d+)([eE][+-]?\d+)?. A regex processor translates a regular expression in the above syntax into an internal representation that can be executed and matched against a string representing the text being searched in. One possible approach is the Thompson's construction algorithm to construct a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA), which is then made deterministic and