Regex search patterns make wildcards look like clumsy clowns because they offer a whole slew of additional options. The most common method of searching is to look for a specific string or character in a text file, for example, by using F3 on a website. To achieve this, a few special characters have to be defined. The dot or period acts as a wildcard and matches any single character, except line break characters. The minus sign or hyphen is used to specify a range of characters.”]
Source: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/security-world/technology/2018/08/explained-regular-expression-regex/