In the context of regular expressions, patterns are text representations of sequences of characters. For instance, if you wanted to know if the word car existed within a character sequence, you would use the pattern car because that is how you represent the exact string. For a more complicated pattern, you can use special characters as placeholders. If instead of searching for car, you wanted to search for any string of text that began with the letter c and ended with the letter r, you would use the c*r pattern, where * represents any number of characters before the first r. The c*r pattern would match any string of characters that begins with c and ends with r, as in cougar, cavalier, or chrysler.