Backslash Character Classes

These are the less versatile, but more concise option. Like the bracket classes, these specify predefined ranges of characters. They all match one character. These are all single characters preceded by the backslash ("\") character:

< - beginning of word
> - end of word
d - digit, equivalent to [[:digit;]]
D - non-digit, equivalent to [^[:digit;]]
s - whitespace, equivalent to [[:space;]]
S - non-whitespace, equivalent to [^[:space;]]
w - word character, equivalent to [[:alnum;]]
W - non-word character, equivalent to [^[:alnum;]]