Ordinary characters consist of all those printable and non-printable characters that are not explicitly designated as metacharacters. This includes all upper- and lowercase alphabetic characters, all digits, all punctuation marks, and some symbols.

The simplest form of a regular expression is a single, ordinary character that matches itself in a searched string. For example, the single-character pattern 'A' matches the letter 'A' wherever it appears in the searched string. Here are some examples of single-character regular expression patterns:

/a/
/7/
/M/

The equivalent VBScript single-character regular expressions are:

"a"
"7"
"M"

You can combine a number of single characters together to form a larger expression. For example, the following JScript regular expression is nothing more than an expression created by combining the single-character expressions 'a', '7', and 'M'.

/a7M/

The equivalent VBScript expression is:

"a7M"

Notice that there is no concatenation operator. All that is required is that you just put one character after another.