title: PlayStation

text: "PlayStation Underground" was a non-traditional magazine that Sony Computer Entertainment America produced and published between Spring 1997 to Spring 2001. Subscribers received two PlayStation CDs, along with a booklet and colorful packaging every quarter. The CDs contained interviews, cheats, programmers moves, game demos and one-of-a-kind Memory Card saves. Several issues showed how a game was created from basic design to final product. Since the CDs could only be run on a PlayStation, it proved a useful marketing tool which spawned a line of "PlayStation Underground JamPacks" Demo CDs and which contained highlights from recent issues of "PlayStation Underground", along with seemingly as many game demos that could be packed on a single CD. Unlike "PlayStation Underground" these were available in most stores for $4.95, were published twice a year in Summer and Winter and usually spotlighted newly released or coming soon games. By 2001, Sony had decided to phase out "Underground" to focus on the "JamPacks" with the release of the PlayStation 2. "PlayStation Underground" CDs are mainly in the hands of collectors these days.


title: PlayStation

text: The most notable of recent PlayStation commercials is the series of "It Only Does Everything" commercials featuring a fictional character called Kevin Butler who is a Vice President at PlayStation. These commercials usually advertise the PlayStation 3 and its games through a series of comedic answers to "Dear PlayStation" queries. These commercials garnered popularity among gamers, though its debut commercial received criticism from the Nigerian government due to a reference to the common 419 scams originating in Nigeria. Sony issued an apology and a new version of the advert with the offending line changed was produced.


title: PlayStation

text: A spin-off of the campaign has been created for the PlayStation Portable which features similar campaign commercials called the "Step Your Game Up" campaign featuring a fictional teenage character named Marcus Rivers acting in a similar fashion to Kevin Butler but answering the "Dear PlayStation" queries about the PSP.


title: PlayStation

text: In July 2006, an advertising campaign in the Netherlands was released in which a white model dressed entirely in white and a black model dressed entirely in black was used to compare Sony's new Ceramic White PSP and the original Piano Black PSP. This series of ads depicted both models fighting with each other and drew criticism from the media for being racist, though Sony maintains that the ad did not feature any racist message.


title: PlayStation

text: In November 2006, a marketing company employed by Sony's American division created a website entitled ""All I want for Xmas is a PSP"", designed to promote the PSP virally. The site contained a blog which was purportedly written by "Charlie", a teenage boy attempting to get his friend Jeremy's parents to buy him a PSP, and providing a "music video" of either Charlie or Jeremy "rapping" about the PSP. Visitors to the website quickly recognized that the domain name was registered to a marketing company, exposing the campaign on sites such as YouTube and digg. Sony was forced to admit that the site was in fact a marketing campaign and in an interview with next-gen.biz, Sony admitted that the idea was ""poorly executed"".


title: PlayStation

text: Between 2009 and 2010, PlayStation was the main kit sponsor of French Ligue 1 club Olympique Lyonnais.


title: PlayStation

text: In 2005, Australian newspaper The Age wrote an article about the PlayStation brand. Among the numerous interviews conducted with various people in the industry was an interview with Dr Jeffrey Brand, associate professor in communication and media at Bond University who said, "PlayStation re-ignited our imagination with video games". Game designers Yoshiki Okamoto called the brand "revolutionary — PlayStation has changed gaming, distribution, sales, image and more", while Evan Wells of Naughty Dog said "PlayStation is responsible for making playing games cool."


title: PlayStation

text: In 2009, ViTrue, Inc. listed the PlayStation brand as number 13 on their "The Vitrue 100: Top Social Brands of 2009". The ranking was based on various aspects mainly dealing with popular social media sites in aspects such as Social Networking, Video Sharing, Photo Sharing and Blogs.


title: PlayStation

text: In 2010, Gizmodo stated that the PlayStation brand was one of the last Sony products to completely stand apart from its competitors, stating that "If you ask the average person on the street what their favorite Sony product is, more often than not you'll hear PlayStation". As of April 2012, the PlayStation brand is the "most followed" brand on social networking site, Facebook, with over 22 million fans and followers in total which is more than any other brand in the entertainment industry. A study by Greenlight's Entertainment Retail has also shown that the PlayStation brand is the most interactive making 634 posts and tweets on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.


title: PlayStation

text: In July 2014, Sony boasted in a company release video that the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita sold a combined total of 100 million units. It was announced at Tokyo Game Show on September 1, 2014, that PlayStation home game consoles claim 78% market share of all home consoles in Japan.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Fiona Shaw (born Fiona Mary Wilson; 10 July 1958) is an Irish film and theatre actress. She is known for her roles as Petunia Dursley in the "Harry Potter" film series (2001–2010), Marnie Stonebrook in the fourth season of the HBO series "True Blood" (2011), and Carolyn Martens in the BBC series "Killing Eve" (2018–22).


title: Fiona Shaw

text: For her performance in "Killing Eve", Shaw won the 2019 BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actress. For her performances in the second seasons of "Killing Eve" and "Fleabag", she received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series respectively. For the third season of "Killing Eve", she was again nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Shaw has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. She won the 1990 Olivier Award for Best Actress for various roles, including "Electra", the 1994 Olivier Award for Best Actress for "Machinal", and the 1997 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for "The Waste Land". Her other stage work includes playing the title role in "Medea" in the West End and on Broadway (2001–2002). She was awarded an Honorary CBE in 2001. In 2020, she was listed at No. 29 on "The Irish Times" list of Ireland's greatest film actors.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Shaw was born Fiona Mary Wilson on 10 July 1958 in Cobh, County Cork, the daughter of physicist Mary T. (Flynn) Wilson and ophthalmic surgeon Denis Joseph Wilson (1922–2011), who wed in 1952. They maintained a home in Montenotte. She attended secondary school at Scoil Mhuire in Cork, and received her degree in philosophy at University College Cork.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Shaw's father, Denis Wilson, studied medicine at University College Cork where he played rugby. He worked for a short time as a GP in London before training to be an ophthalmologist as the Manchester Royal Infirmary in 1960. On his return to Cork he was appointed to the Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, where he worked until his retirement, which coincided with the transfer of the eye unit to Cork University Hospital. He taught at UCC and the RCSI. After retiring he wrote De Iron Trote, a history of the Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital and continued his interest in the arts by studying for a Diploma in Art History at UCC.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Shaw trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London and was part of a "new wave" of actors to emerge from RADA. She received much acclaim as Julia in the National Theatre production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "The Rivals" (1983). Her theatrical roles include Celia in "As You Like It" (1984), Madame de Volanges in "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (1985), Katherine in "The Taming of the Shrew" (1987), Lady Franjul in "The New Inn" (1987), Young Woman in "Machinal" (1993), for which she won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress, Winnie in "Happy Days" (2007), and the title roles in "Electra" (1988), "The Good Person of Sechuan" (1989), "Hedda Gabler" (1991), "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1998) and "Medea" (2000). She performed T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" as a one-person show at the Liberty Theatre in New York to great acclaim in 1996, winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show for her performance. She played Miss Morrison in the 1984 "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" episode "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" and Catherine Greenshaw in "Agatha Christie's Marple" episode "Greenshaw's Folly" in 2013.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Shaw notably played the male lead in "Richard II", directed by Deborah Warner in 1995. Shaw has collaborated with Warner on a number of occasions, on both stage and screen. Shaw has also worked in film and television, including "My Left Foot" (1989), "Mountains of the Moon" (1990), "Three Men and a Little Lady" (1990), "Super Mario Bros." (1993), "Undercover Blues" (1993), "Persuasion" (1995), "Jane Eyre" (1996), "The Butcher Boy" (1997), "The Avengers" (1998), "Gormenghast" (2000), and five of the "Harry Potter" films in which she played Harry Potter's aunt. Shaw had a brief but key role in Brian DePalma's "The Black Dahlia" (2006).


title: Fiona Shaw

text: In 2009, Shaw collaborated with Deborah Warner again, taking the lead role in Tony Kushner's translation of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children". In a 2002 article for "The Daily Telegraph", Rupert Christiansen described their professional relationship as "surely one of the most richly creative partnerships in theatrical history." Other collaborations between the two women include productions of Brecht's "The Good Woman of Szechuan" and Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler", the latter was adapted for television.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Shaw appeared in "The Waste Land" at Wilton's Music Hall in January 2010 and in a National Theatre revival of "London Assurance" in March 2010. In November 2010, Shaw starred in Ibsen's "John Gabriel Borkman" at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin alongside Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan. The play was also staged in New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2011. In 2012, Shaw appeared in the National Theatre revival of "Scenes from an Execution" by Howard Barker. The world's largest solo theatre festival, United Solo, recognised her performance in "The Testament of Mary" on Broadway with the 2013 United Solo Special Award.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Shaw appeared in season four of the American TV show "True Blood". Shaw's character, Marnie Stonebrook, has been described as an underachieving palm reader who is spiritually possessed by an actual witch. In 2018, Shaw began portraying Carolyn Martens, the head of MI6's Russia-focused branch, in BBC America's "Killing Eve". For her performance, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Television Series. Later the same year, she played a senior MI6 officer in "Mrs Wilson". She currently stars in the "Star Wars" television series "Andor", a prequel to the movie "Rogue One", as the titular character's adoptive mother, Maarva Andor.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Shaw is an award-winning audiobook narrator; in October 2022, Shaw was awarded an AudioFile Magazine Earphone Award for her performance of "The Bullet That Missed", the third book in Richard Osman's "The Thursday Murder Club" series.


title: Fiona Shaw

text: Shaw is a lesbian, although she had dated men for many years before realising her sexual orientation, stating "It was a shock. I was full of self-hatred and thought I would come back into the fold shortly. But I just didn't."


title: Fiona Shaw

text: A Catholic, from 2002 to 2005, Shaw was the partner of English actress Saffron Burrows. She met Sri Lankan economist Sonali Deraniyagala after reading Deraniyagala's memoir, and they married in 2018.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Luther Ronzoni Vandross Jr. (April 20, 1951 – July 1, 2005) was an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. Known for his sweet and soulful vocals, Vandross has sold over 40 million records worldwide. He achieved eleven consecutive Platinum albums and eight Grammy Awards, including Best Male R&B Vocal Performance four different times. In 2004, Vandross won a total of four Grammy Awards, including the Grammy Award for Song of the Year for a song recorded not long before his death, "Dance with My Father".


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross worked as a backing vocalist in the 1970s, and appeared on albums by artists such as Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, Todd Rundgren, Judy Collins, Chaka Khan, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, David Bowie, Ben E. King, Stevie Wonder, and Donna Summer. He later became a lead singer of the group Change, which released its Gold-certified debut album, "The Glow of Love", in 1980 on Warner/RFC Records. After Vandross left the group, he was signed to Epic Records as a solo artist and released his debut solo album, "Never Too Much", in 1981.


title: Luther Vandross

text: His hit songs include "Never Too Much", "Here and Now", "Any Love", "Power of Love/Love Power", "I Can Make It Better" and "For You to Love". Many of his songs were covers of original music by other artists such as "If This World Were Mine" (duet with Cheryl Lynn), "Since I Lost My Baby", "Superstar", "I (Who Have Nothing)" and "Always and Forever". Duets such as "The Closer I Get to You" with Beyoncé, "Endless Love" with Mariah Carey and "The Best Things in Life Are Free" with Janet Jackson were all hit songs in his career.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Luther Ronzoni Vandross, Jr. was born on April 20, 1951, at Bellevue Hospital, in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. He was the fourth child and second son of Mary Ida Vandross and Luther Vandross, Sr. His father was an upholsterer and singer, and his mother was a nurse. Vandross was raised in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the NYCHA Alfred E. Smith Houses public housing development. At the age of three, having his own phonograph, Vandross taught himself to play the piano by ear.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross' father died of diabetes when Vandross was eight years old. In 2003, Vandross wrote the song "Dance with My Father" and dedicated it to him; the title was based on his childhood memories and his mother's recollections of the family singing and dancing in the house. His family moved to the Bronx when he was nine. His sisters, Patricia "Pat" and Ann, began taking Vandross to the Apollo Theater and to a theater in Brooklyn to see Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin. Patricia sang with the vocal group The Crests and was featured on the songs "My Juanita" and "Sweetest One".


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross graduated from William Howard Taft High School in the Bronx in 1969, and attended Western Michigan University for one and a half semesters before dropping out to continue pursuing a career in music.


title: Luther Vandross

text: While in high school, Vandross founded the first Patti LaBelle fan club, of which he was president. He also performed in a group, Shades of Jade, that once played at the Apollo Theater. During his early years in show business, he appeared several times at the Apollo's famous amateur night. While he was a member of a theater workshop, Listen My Brother, he was involved in the singles "Only Love Can Make a Better World" and "Listen My Brother". The group performed in front of tens of thousands at the Harlem Cultural Festival in late August 1969. Directly afterward, he appeared with the group in the pilot episode and other episodes of the first season of "Sesame Street" during 1969–1970.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross added backing vocals to "Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway" in 1972, and worked on Delores Hall's "Hall-Mark" album (1973). He sang with her on the song "Who's Gonna Make It Easier for Me", which he wrote, and he contributed another song, "In This Lonely Hour". After his song "Funky Music (Is a Part of Me)" was re-written as "Fascination" with David Bowie for the latter's "Young Americans" (1975) album, Vandross went on to tour with him as a back-up vocalist in September 1974. Vandross wrote "Everybody Rejoice/A Brand New Day" for the 1975 Broadway musical "The Wiz".


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross also sang backing vocals for artists, including Roberta Flack, Chaka Khan, Ben E. King, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, Carly Simon, Barbra Streisand, David Bowie, Cat Stevens, Gary Glitter, Ringo Starr, Sister Sledge, and Donna Summer, and for the bands Mandrill, Chic and Todd Rundgren's Utopia.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Before his solo breakthrough, Vandross was part of a singing quintet named Luther in the late 1970s. The quintet consisted of former Shades of Jade members Anthony Hinton and Diane Sumler, as well as Theresa V. Reed, and Christine Wiltshire, signed to Cotillion Records. Although the singles "It's Good for the Soul", "Funky Music (Is a Part of Me)", and "The Second Time Around" were relatively successful, their two albums, the self-titled "Luther" (1976) and "This Close to You" (1977), which Vandross produced, did not sell enough to make the charts. Vandross bought back the rights to those albums after Cotillion dropped the group, preventing them from being re-released.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross also wrote and sang commercial jingles from 1977 until the early 1980s, for companies including NBC, Mountain Dew, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, and Juicy Fruit. He continued his successful career as a popular session singer during the late 1970s. His aforementioned song "Everybody Rejoice", sometimes called "A Brand New Day", was used in a Kodak commercial during the mid-1970s.


title: Luther Vandross

text: In 1978, Vandross sang lead vocals for Gregg Diamond's disco band, Bionic Boogie, on the song titled "Hot Butterfly". Also in 1978, he appeared on Quincy Jones's "Sounds...and Stuff Like That!!", most notably on the song "I'm Gonna Miss You in the Morning" along with Patti Austin. Vandross also sang with the band Soirée and was the lead vocalist on the track "You Are the Sunshine of My Life"; he also contributed background vocals to the album along with Jocelyn Brown and Sharon Redd, each of whom also saw solo success. Additionally, he sang the lead vocals on the group Mascara's LP title song "See You in L.A." released in 1979. Vandross also appeared on the group Charme's 1979 album "Let It In".


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross made his career breakthrough as a featured singer with the vaunted pop-dance act Change, a studio concept created by French-Italian businessman Jacques Fred Petrus. Their 1980 hits, "The Glow of Love" (by Romani, Malavasi and Garfield) and "Searching" (by Malavasi), featured Vandross as the lead singer. In a 2001 interview with "Vibe", Vandross said "The Glow of Love" was "the most beautiful song I've ever sung in my life." Both songs were from Change's debut album, "The Glow of Love".


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross was originally intended to perform on their second and highly successful album "Miracles" in 1981, but declined the offer as Petrus didn't pay enough money. Vandross' decision led to a recording contract with Epic Records that same year, but he also provided background vocals on "Miracles" and on the new Petrus-created act, the B. B. & Q. Band in 1981. During that hectic year Vandross jump-started his second attempt at a solo career with his debut album, "Never Too Much". In addition to the hit title track it contained a version of the Bacharach & David song "A House Is Not a Home".


title: Luther Vandross

text: The song "Never Too Much", written by him, reached number-one on the R&B charts. This period also marked the beginning of songwriting collaboration with bassist Marcus Miller, who played on many of the tracks and would also produce or co-produce a number of tracks for Vandross. The "Never Too Much" album was arranged by Vandross's high school classmate, Nat Adderley, Jr., a collaboration that would last through Vandross's career.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross released a series of successful R&B albums during the 1980s and continued his session work with guest vocals on groups like Charme in 1982. Many of his earlier albums made a bigger impact on the R&B charts than on the pop charts. During the 1980s, two of Vandross' singles reached No. 1 on the "Billboard" R&B charts: "Stop to Love", in 1986, and a duet with Gregory Hines—"There's Nothing Better Than Love." Vandross was at the helm as producer for Aretha Franklin's Gold-certified, award-winning comeback album "Jump to It". He also produced the follow-up album, 1983's "Get It Right".


title: Luther Vandross

text: In 1983, the opportunity to work with his main musical influence, Dionne Warwick, came about with Vandross producing, writing songs, and singing on "How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye", her fourth album for Arista Records. The title track duet reached No. 27 on the Hot 100 chart (#7 R&B/#4 Adult Contemporary), while the second single, "Got a Date" was a moderate hit (#45 R&B/#15 Club Play).


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross wrote and produced "It's Hard for Me to Say" for Diana Ross from her "Red Hot Rhythm & Blues" album. Ross performed the song as an a cappella tribute to Oprah Winfrey on her final season of "The Oprah Winfrey Show". She then proceeded to add it to her successful 2010–12 ". Vandross also recorded a version of this song on his "Your Secret Love" album in 1996.


title: Luther Vandross

text: In 1985, Vandross first spotted the talent of Jimmy Salvemini, who was 15 at the time, on "Star Search". He thought Salvemini had the perfect voice for some of his songs, and contacted him. He was managed by his brother, Larry Salvemini. A contract was negotiated with Elektra Records for $250,000 and Vandross agreed to produce the album. He contacted his old friends – Cheryl Lynn, Alfa Anderson (Chic), Phoebe Snow and Irene Cara – to appear on the record. Jimmy Salvemini's album, "Roll It", was released in 1986.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross also sang the ad-libs and background vocals, along with Syreeta Wright and Philip Bailey, in Stevie Wonder's 1985 hit "Part-Time Lover". In 1984, he voiced a cartoon character named Zack for ABC's "Zack of All Trades", a three Saturday morning animated PSA spots.


title: Luther Vandross

text: The 1989 compilation album "The Best of Luther Vandross... The Best of Love" included the ballad "Here and Now", his first single to chart in the Billboard pop chart top ten, peaking at number six.


title: Luther Vandross

text: In 1990, Vandross wrote, produced and sang background for Whitney Houston in a song entitled "Who Do You Love" which appeared on her album "I'm Your Baby Tonight". That year, he guest starred on the television sitcom "227".


title: Luther Vandross

text: More albums followed in the 1990s, beginning with 1991's "Power of Love" which spawned two top ten pop hits. He won his first Grammy award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance in 1991. He won his second Best Male R&B Vocal in the Grammy Awards of 1992, and his track "Power of Love/Love Power" won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Song in the same year. In 1992, "The Best Things in Life Are Free", a duet with Janet Jackson from the movie "Mo' Money" became a hit. In 1993, he had a brief non-speaking role in the Robert Townsend movie "The Meteor Man". He played a hit man who plotted to stop Townsend's title character.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross hit the top ten again in 1994, teaming with Mariah Carey on a cover version of Lionel Richie and Diana Ross's duet "Endless Love". It was included on the album "Songs", a collection of songs which had inspired Vandross over the years. He also appears on "The Lady Is a Tramp" released on Frank Sinatra's "Duets" album. At the Grammy Awards of 1997, he won his third Best Male R&B Vocal for the track "Your Secret Love".


title: Luther Vandross

text: A second greatest hits album, released in 1997, compiled most of his 1990s hits and was his final album released through Epic Records. After releasing "I Know" on Virgin Records, he signed with J Records. His first album on Clive Davis's new label, entitled "Luther Vandross", was released in 2001, and it produced the hits "Take You Out" (#7 R&B/#26 Pop), and "I'd Rather" (#17 Adult Contemporary/#40 R&B/#83 Pop). Vandross scored at least one top 10 R&B hit every year from 1981 to 1994.


title: Luther Vandross

text: In 1997, Vandross sang the American national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner", during Super Bowl XXXI at the Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans, Louisiana.


title: Luther Vandross

text: He made two public appearances at Diana Ross's Return to Love Tour: at its opening in Philadelphia at First Union Spectrum and its final stop at Madison Square Garden on July 6, 2000.


title: Luther Vandross

text: In September 2001, Vandross performed a rendition of Michael Jackson's hit song "Man in the Mirror" at Jackson's 30th Anniversary special, alongside Usher and 98 Degrees.


title: Luther Vandross

text: In the spring of 2003, Vandross' last collaboration was Doc Powell's song "What's Going On", a cover of Marvin Gaye's seminal 1971 original, from Powell's album "97th and Columbus".


title: Luther Vandross

text: In 2003, Vandross released the album "Dance with My Father". It sold 442,000 copies in the first week and debuted at number one on the "Billboard" 200 album chart. The title track of the same name, which was dedicated to Vandross' childhood memories of dancing with his father, won Vandross and his co-writer, Richard Marx, the 2004 Grammy Award for Song of the Year. The song also won Vandross his fourth and final award in the Best Male R&B Vocal Performance category. The album was his only career No. 1 on the "Billboard" album chart. The video for the title track features various celebrities alongside their fathers and other family members. The second single released from the album, "Think About You", was the number one Urban Adult Contemporary Song of 2004 according to "Radio & Records".


title: Luther Vandross

text: In 2003, after the televised NCAA Men's Basketball championship, CBS Sports gave "One Shining Moment" a new look. Vandross, who had been to only one basketball game in his life, was the new singer, and the video had none of the special effects, like glowing basketballs and star trails, that videos from previous years had. This song version is in use today.


title: Luther Vandross

text: J Records released a song in 2006, "Shine"—an upbeat R&B track that samples Chic's disco song "My Forbidden Lover"—which reached No. 31 on the Billboard R&B chart. The song was originally slated to be released on the soundtrack to the movie, "The Fighting Temptations", but it was shelved. A later remix of the song peaked at No. 10 on the Club Play chart. "Shine" and a track titled "Got You Home" were previously unreleased songs on "The Ultimate Luther Vandross" (2006), a greatest hits album on Epic Records/J Records/Legacy Recordings that was released August 22, 2006.


title: Luther Vandross

text: On October 16, 2007, Epic Records/J Records/Legacy Recordings released a 4-disc boxed set titled "Love, Luther". It features nearly all of Vandross's R&B and pop hits throughout his career, as well as unreleased live tracks, alternate versions, and outtakes from sessions that Vandross recorded. The set also includes "There's Only You", a version of which had originally appeared on the soundtrack to the 1987 film "Made in Heaven".


title: Luther Vandross

text: In October 2015, Sony Music released a re-configured edition of its "The Essential Luther Vandross" compilation containing three unreleased songs: "Love It, Love It" (which made its premiere a year prior on the UK compilation "The Greatest Hits"), a live recording of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" with Paul Simon and Jennifer Holliday, and a cover of Astrud Gilberto's "Look to the Rainbow".


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross was never married and had no children. His mother outlived all of her four children, and his three older siblings all predeceased him due to diabetes and asthma.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross' sexual orientation was a subject of media speculation. Jason King, writing in Vandross' obituary in "The Village Voice", said: "Though he never came out as gay or bisexual, you had to be wearing blinders." According to Gene Davis, a television producer who worked with Vandross, "Everybody in the business knew that Luther was gay". In 2006, Bruce Vilanch, a friend and colleague of Vandross, told "Out" magazine, "He said to me, 'No one knows I'm in the life.' ... He had very few sexual contacts". According to Vilanch, Vandross experienced his longest romantic relationship with a man while living in Los Angeles during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In December 2017, 12 years after his death, Vandross's friend Patti LaBelle confirmed that he was gay. In addition, Vandross was well aware that officially coming out as gay while he was actively making music would have been detrimental to the trajectory of his career, given the majority of his target audience were women seeking some mode of emotional engagement from his words. LaBelle shared that "[Vandross] had a lot of lady fans" and "he just didn't want to upset the world".


title: Luther Vandross

text: In December 1985, Vandross filed a libel suit against a British magazine after it attributed his 85-pound weight loss to AIDS. He weighed when he started a diet in May of that year.


title: Luther Vandross

text: After signing Jimmy Salvemini and having completed his debut album, "Roll It", Vandross, Salvemini, and Salvemini's brother and manager Larry, decided to celebrate. On January 12, 1986, they were riding in Vandross's 1985 Mercedes-Benz convertible on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, in the north section of Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles. Vandross was driving at 50 mph (80 km/h) in a 35 mph (56 km/h) zone when his Mercedes veered across the double yellow center line of the two lane street, turned sideways and collided with the front of a 1972 Mercury Marquis that was headed southbound, then swung around and hit a 1979 Cadillac Seville head on. Vandross and Jimmy Salvemini were rushed to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Larry, who was in the passenger seat, was killed during the collision. Vandross suffered three broken ribs, a broken hip, several bruises and facial cuts. Jimmy, who was in the back of the car, had cuts, bruises and contusions. Vandross faced vehicular manslaughter charges as a result of Larry's death, and his driving license was suspended for a year. There was no evidence that Vandross was under the influence of alcohol or other drugs; he pleaded no contest to reckless driving. At first, the Salvemini family was supportive of Vandross, but later filed a wrongful death suit against him. The case was settled out of court with a payment to the Salvemini family for about $630,000. "Roll It" was released later that year.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross had diabetes and hypertension. On April 16, 2003, he had a severe stroke at his home in New York City and was in a coma for nearly two months. The stroke affected his ability to speak and sing and required him to use a wheelchair.


title: Luther Vandross

text: At the 2004 Grammy Awards, Vandross appeared in a pre-taped video segment to accept his Song of the Year Award for "Dance with My Father", saying, "When I say goodbye it's never for long, because I "believe in the power of love" (Vandross sang the last six words). His mother, Mary, accepted the award in person on his behalf. His last public appearance was on May 6, 2004, on "The Oprah Winfrey Show". Vandross died on July 1, 2005, at the JFK Medical Center in Edison, New Jersey, at the age of 54 due to a heart attack.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross's funeral was held at Riverside Church in New York City on July 8, 2005. Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick and Cissy Houston were among the speakers and singers at the service. Vandross was entombed at the George Washington Memorial Park in Paramus, New Jersey. His mother, Mary Ida Vandross, died in 2008.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Possessing a tenor vocal range, Vandross was commonly referred to as "The Velvet Voice" in reference to his vocal talent, and was sometimes called "The Best Voice of a Generation". He was also regarded as the "Pavarotti of Pop" by many critics.


title: Luther Vandross

text: Vandross has been cited as an inspiration on a number of other artists, including 112, Boyz II Men, D'Angelo, Hootie & the Blowfish, Jaheim, John Legend, Mint Condition, Ne-Yo, Ruben Studdard, and Usher. Stokley Williams, the lead singer of Mint Condition, has said that he has "studied Luther for such a long time because he was the epitome of perfect tone." On his influence, John Legend has said, "All us people making slow jams now, we was inspired by the slow jams Luther Vandross was making."


title: Luther Vandross

text: In 2008, Vandross was ranked No. 54 on "Rolling Stone" magazine's List of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. Mariah Carey stated in several interviews that standing next to Vandross while recording their duet "Endless Love" was intimidating. In 2010, NPR included Vandross in its 50 Greatest Voices in recorded history, saying Vandross represents "the platinum standard for R&B song stylings." The announcement was made on NPR's "All Things Considered" on November 29, 2010.


title: Luther Vandross

text: In 1999, Whitney Houston sang Vandross's "So Amazing" as a tribute to Vandross as he sat in the audience during the Soul Train Awards. Johnny Gill, El DeBarge, and Kenny Lattimore provided background vocals. On July 27, 2004, GRP Records released a smooth jazz various artists tribute album, "Forever, for Always, for Luther", including ten popular songs written by Vandross. The album featured vocal arrangements by Luther, and was produced by Rex Rideout and Bud Harner. Rideout had co-authored songs, contributed arrangements and played keyboards on Vandross's final three albums. The tribute album was mixed by Ray Bardani, who recorded and mixed most of Luther's music over the years. It featured an ensemble of smooth jazz performers, many of whom had previously worked with Vandross.


title: Luther Vandross

text: On September 20, 2005, the album "" was released. The album is a collection of some of his songs performed by various artists, including Stevie Wonder, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Fantasia, Beyoncé, Donna Summer, Alicia Keys, Elton John, Celine Dion, Wyclef Jean, Babyface, Patti LaBelle, John Legend, Angie Stone, Jamie Foxx, Teddy Pendergrass, and Aretha Franklin. Aretha Franklin won a Grammy for her rendition of "A House Is Not a Home", and Stevie Wonder and Beyoncé won a Grammy for their cover of "So Amazing".


title: Luther Vandross

text: On November 21, 2006, saxophonist Dave Koz released a followup to the earlier smooth jazz GRP tribute album, this time on his own Rendezvous Entertainment label, an album called "Forever, for Always, for Luther Volume II", also produced by Rex Rideout and Bud Harner. Koz played on all the featured Luther Vandross tracks, which were recorded by various smooth jazz artists.


title: Luther Vandross

text: On April 20, 2021, Google celebrated his 70th birthday with a Google Doodle of an animated clip that plays Vandross's song "Never Too Much".


title: Gary Lineker

text: Gary Winston Lineker (; born 30 November 1960) is an English former professional footballer and current sports broadcaster. He is regarded as having been one of the greatest English strikers. His media career began with the BBC, where he has presented the flagship football programme "Match of the Day" since the late 1990s, the longest tenure of any MOTD presenter. Lineker is also the BBC's lead presenter for live football matches, including coverage of international tournaments such as the FIFA World Cup. He has also worked for Al Jazeera Sports, Eredivisie Live, NBC Sports Network, and BT Sport's coverage of the UEFA Champions League.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker began his football career at Leicester City FC in 1978, and finished as the First Division's joint top goalscorer in 1984–85. He then moved to league champions Everton where he won both the PFA Players' Player of the Year and FWA Footballer of the Year awards in his debut season, before moving to Spanish giants Barcelona. With Barcelona, he won the 1987–88 Copa del Rey and the 1989 European Cup Winners' Cup. He joined Tottenham Hotspur in 1989, and won his second FWA Footballer of the Year and won the FA Cup, his first and only major trophy in English football. Lineker's final club was Nagoya Grampus Eight; he retired in 1994 after two seasons at the Japanese side.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker made his England debut in 1984, earning 80 caps and scoring 48 goals over an eight-year international career. He is England's fourth-highest scorer, behind Harry Kane, Wayne Rooney and Bobby Charlton and his international goals-to-games ratio remains one of the best for the country. His six goals in the 1986 FIFA World Cup made him the tournament's top scorer, receiving the Golden Boot. Lineker was again integral to England's progress to the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup, scoring another four goals. He still holds England's record for goals in the FIFA World Cup.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker is also the only player to have been the top scorer in England with three clubs: Leicester City, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur. Notably, he never received a yellow or red card during his 16-year career. As a result, he was honoured in 1990 with the FIFA Fair Play Award. In a senior career which spanned 16 years and 567 competitive games, Lineker scored a total of 330 goals, including 282 goals at club level. After his retirement from football he was inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame. A keen supporter of Leicester City, he led a consortium that invested in his old club, saving it from bankruptcy, and was appointed honorary vice-president.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Gary Winston Lineker was born on 30 November 1960 in Leicester, the son of Margaret P. (Abbs) and Barry Lineker. He was given his middle name in honour of Winston Churchill, with whom he shares a birthday. He has one brother, Wayne, who is two years his junior. Lineker grew up with his family in the city, playing football with Wayne. Their father was a greengrocer, as were their grandfather William and great-grandfather George, in Leicester. Barry Lineker ran Lineker's fruit and veg stall in Leicester Market, and as a child and a young player Gary regularly helped out on the stall. Lineker, who is white, received racial abuse as a child for his dark features.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker first attended Caldecote Road School (Caldecote Juniors), Braunstone in Leicester (east of the Meridian Centre). He then went to the City of Leicester Boys' Grammar School (now City of Leicester College) on Downing Drive in Evington, owing to his preference for football rather than rugby, which was the main sport of most schools near his home. Lineker was equally talented at both football and cricket. From the ages of 11 to 16 he captained the Leicestershire Schools cricket team, and had felt that he had a higher chance of succeeding at it rather than football. He later stated on "They Think It's All Over" that as a teenager he idolised former England captain David Gower, who was playing for Leicestershire at the time. During his youth he played for Aylestone Park Youth, later becoming the club's president.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker left school with four O Levels. One of his teachers wrote on his report card that he "concentrates too much on football" and that he would "never make a living at that". He then joined the youth academy at Leicester City in 1976.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker began his career at his hometown club Leicester City after leaving school in 1977, turning professional in the 1978–79 season and making his senior debut on New Year's Day 1979 in a 2–0 win at Filbert Street over Oldham Athletic in the Second Division. He earned a Second Division title medal a year later with 19 appearances, but played just nine league games in 1980–81 as Leicester went straight back down.


title: Gary Lineker

text: However, he became a regular player in 1981–82, scoring 19 goals in all competitions that season. Although Leicester missed out on promotion, they reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup, and clinched promotion a year later as Lineker scored 26 times in the Second Division. In 1983–84, he enjoyed regular First Division action for the first time and was the division's second-highest scorer with 22 goals, although Leicester failed to finish anywhere near the top of the league. He was the First Division's joint top scorer in 1984–85 with 24 goals, and was enjoying a prolific partnership with Alan Smith. However, by this stage he was attracting the attention of bigger clubs, and a move from Filbert Street was looking certain.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In the 1985 close season, defending league champions Everton signed Lineker for £800,000; he scored 40 goals in 57 games for his new team in the 1985–86 season. Lineker's first game for Everton happened to be away to Leicester City; at half time, he walked into the Leicester dressing room by mistake. He was again the First Division's leading goal scorer, this time with 30 goals (including three hat-tricks), and helped Everton finish second in the league. While at Everton, they reached the FA Cup final for the third consecutive year but lost 3–1 to Liverpool, despite Lineker giving them an early lead when he outpaced Alan Hansen to score. Liverpool had also pipped Everton to the title by just two points. "I was only on Merseyside a short time, nine or 10 months in total really, but it was still a happy time personally, while professionally it was one of the most successful periods of my career", he says. "I still have an affinity towards Everton."


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker scored three hat-tricks for Everton; at home to Birmingham City in a 4–1 league win on 31 August 1985, at home to Manchester City in a 4–0 home win on 11 February 1986, and then in the penultimate league game of the season on 3 May 1986, when they kept their title hopes alive with a 6–1 home win over Southampton. On his final league appearance, he scored twice in a 3–1 home win over West Ham United whose own title hopes had just disappeared. However, he and his colleagues were denied title glory as Liverpool also won their final league game of the season at Chelsea.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker has consistently stated since retiring from football that this Everton team was the best club side he ever played in.


title: Gary Lineker

text: After winning the Golden Boot at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, Lineker was signed by Barcelona for £2.8 million. Barcelona were being managed by former Queens Park Rangers manager Terry Venables, who had also brought in Manchester United and Wales striker Mark Hughes. Barcelona gave Lineker his first chance of European football, as Leicester had never qualified for Europe while he played for them, and Everton were denied a place in the European Cup for 1985–86 due to the ban on English clubs in European competitions following the Heysel disaster.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker made his Barcelona debut against Racing Santander, scoring twice. His Golden Boot-winning performance at the finals generated much anticipation of success at the Camp Nou, and he did not disappoint, scoring 21 goals in 41 games during his first season, including a hat-trick in a 3–2 win over archrivals Real Madrid. Barcelona went on to win the Copa del Rey in 1988 and the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1989. Lineker played in Barcelona's shock home and away defeats to Dundee United. Barcelona manager Johan Cruyff decided to play Lineker on the right of the midfield and he was eventually no longer an automatic choice in the team.


title: Gary Lineker

text: With 42 goals in 103 La Liga appearances, Lineker became the highest scoring British player in the competition's history, but was later surpassed by Gareth Bale in March 2016.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson attempted to sign Lineker to partner his ex-Barcelona teammate Mark Hughes in attack, but Lineker instead signed for Tottenham Hotspur in July 1989 for £1.1 million. Over three seasons, he scored 67 goals in 105 league games and won the FA Cup while playing for the club. He finished as top scorer in the First Division in the 1989–90 season, scoring 24 goals as Spurs finished third.


title: Gary Lineker

text: He finally collected an English trophy when he won the 1991 FA Cup Final with Spurs, who beat Nottingham Forest 2–1. This was despite Lineker having a goal controversially disallowed for offside and also having a penalty saved by goalkeeper Mark Crossley. Lineker had contributed to Tottenham's run to the final. In the semi-final he scored twice in a 3–1 win over North London rivals Arsenal.


title: Gary Lineker

text: He was the top division's second-highest goalscorer in 1991–92 with 28 goals from 35 games, behind Ian Wright, who scored 29 times in 42 games. Despite Lineker's personal performance, Tottenham finished this final pre-Premier League season in 15th place. His last goal in English football came on the last day of the season in a 3–1 defeat to Manchester United at Old Trafford.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In November 1991, Lineker accepted an offer of a two-year contract from J1 League club Nagoya Grampus Eight. The transfer fee paid to Tottenham Hotspur was £2 million. He officially joined Nagoya Grampus Eight after playing his final game for Spurs on 2 May 1992, when he scored the consolation goal in a 3–1 defeat by Manchester United on the last day of the season. Shortly before accepting the offer from Nagoya Grampus Eight, Tottenham had rejected an offer from ambitious Second Division club Blackburn Rovers, who had recently been taken over by steel baron Jack Walker.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Having scored 9 goals in 23 appearances over two injury impacted seasons for Nagoya Grampus Eight, he announced his retirement from playing in September 1994. The English national media had previously reported that he would be returning to England to complete his playing career at Middlesbrough or Southampton.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker was capped once by the England B national team, playing in a 2–0 home win over New Zealand's B team on 13 November 1984. He first played for the full England team against Scotland in 1984. He played five games in the 1986 World Cup and was top scorer of the tournament with six goals, winning the Golden Boot, making him the first English player to have done so. He scored the second quickest hat-trick ever at a FIFA World Cup tournament against Poland, the second English player to score a hat-trick at a World Cup, and scored two goals against Paraguay in the second round. He played most of the tournament wearing a lightweight cast on his forearm. He scored for England in the World Cup quarter-final against Argentina, but the game ended in defeat as Diego Maradona scored twice for the opposition (the first goal being the "Hand of God" handball, and the second being the "Goal of the Century"). In 1988, Lineker played in Euro 88, but failed to score as England lost all three Group games. It was later established that he had been suffering from hepatitis.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In the 1990 World Cup, he scored four goals to help England reach the semi-finals. He was unwell during the tournament, and accidentally defecated in his shorts during the opening group game against the Republic of Ireland. After Andreas Brehme sent England 1–0 down in the semi-final, Lineker received a pass from Paul Parker and escaped two West German defenders on his way to scoring the equaliser, but the West Germans triumphed in the penalty shoot-out and went on to win the trophy. Later he said: "Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win." Lineker's equaliser appears in the popular England national team anthem, "Three Lions", with the lyric "When Lineker scored".


title: Gary Lineker

text: He retired from international football with eighty caps and forty-eight goals, one fewer goal than Sir Bobby Charlton's England record (which Charlton accrued over 106 caps). In what proved to be his last England match, against Sweden at Euro 92, he was substituted by England coach Graham Taylor in favour of Arsenal striker Alan Smith, ultimately denying him the chance to equal—or even better—Charlton's record. He had earlier missed a penalty that would have brought him level, in a pre-tournament friendly against Brazil. He was visibly upset at the decision, not looking at Taylor as he took the bench.


title: Gary Lineker

text: He scored four goals in an England match on two occasions and is one of very few players never to have been given a yellow card or a red card in any type of game.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Following retirement from professional football, he developed a career in the media, initially on BBC Radio 5 Live and as a football pundit before replacing Des Lynam as the BBC's anchorman for football coverage, including their flagship football television programme "Match of the Day", and as a team captain on the sports game show "They Think It's All Over" from 1995 to 2003. Following the departure of Steve Rider from the BBC, Lineker, who is a keen recreational golfer with a handicap of four, became the new presenter for the BBC's golf coverage. Also, he presented "Grandstand" in the London studio while then-presenter Desmond Lynam was in Aintree when the Grand National was abandoned because of a bomb alert at the racecourse in 1997. Despite receiving some criticism from his peers, he continued to front the BBC's coverage of the Masters and The Open, where he put his language skills to good use by giving an impromptu interview in Spanish with Argentinian Andrés Romero.


title: Gary Lineker

text: He participated in Prince Edward's charity television special "The Grand Knockout Tournament" in 1987. Lineker also appeared in the 1991 play "An Evening with Gary Lineker" by Arthur Smith and Chris England, which was adapted for television in 1994. He presented a six-part TV series for the BBC in 1998 (directed by Lloyd Stanton) called "Golden Boots", with other football celebrities. It was an extensive history of the World Cup focusing on the 'Golden Boots' (top scorers).


title: Gary Lineker

text: In 2001, Lineker appeared in the TV show "Brass Eye" (episode "Paedogeddon"). In 2002, Lineker had a cameo appearance in the film "Bend It Like Beckham". In 2005, Lineker was sued for defamation by Australian footballer Harry Kewell over comments Lineker had made writing in his column in "The Sunday Telegraph" about Kewell's transfer from Leeds United to Liverpool. However, the jury was unable to reach a verdict. It became known during the case that the article had actually been ghost-written by a journalist at "The Sunday Telegraph" following a telephone interview with Lineker.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In 2006, Lineker took on an acting role as the voice of "Underground Ernie" on the BBC's children's channel, CBeebies. In December 2008, Lineker appeared on the ITV1 television programme "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" where he and English rugby union player Austin Healey won £50,000 for the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation. In 2009, Lineker and his wife Danielle hosted a series of the BBC's "Northern Exposure", following on from Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen from the previous year in visiting and showcasing locations throughout Northern Ireland.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In May 2010, Lineker resigned from his role as columnist for "The Mail on Sunday" in protest over the sting operation against Lord Triesman that reportedly jeopardised England's bid to host the 2018 World Cup. Triesman resigned as chairman of the bid and the FA on 16 May 2010 after the publication of a secret recording of a conversation between the peer and a former ministerial aide, during which he claimed that Spain and Russia were planning to bribe referees at the World Cup in South Africa.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker then began working as an anchor for the English language football coverage for Al Jazeera Sport, which is broadcast throughout most of the Middle East. He left the Qatar-based network in 2012.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In 2013, Lineker began working for NBCSN as part of their Premier League coverage, and contributing to the US version of "Match of the Day". On 9 June 2015, Lineker was unveiled as the lead presenter of BT Sport's Champions League coverage. On 13 August 2016, Lineker presented the first "Match of the Day" of the 2016–17 season wearing only boxer shorts. Believing it would simply not happen, he had promised in a tweet from December 2015 that if Leicester City won the Premier League, he would "present Match of the Day in just my undies".


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker was the highest-paid BBC employee, receiving payments of £1.75–1.76 million in the years 2016–17, 2017–18, 2018–19, and 2019–20, according to the BBC's list of top salaries. His pay has been criticised by Julian Knight, chair of the parliamentary Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, and Dame Esther Rantzen. The BBC's Director General, Tim Davie, stated that Lineker's pay was justified "because of the value of analysis to the viewing audience".


title: Gary Lineker

text: In 2021, Lineker makes a number of cameo appearances playing himself in the American football comedy TV series "Ted Lasso".


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker has appeared in television commercials for the Leicester-based snack company Walkers. Originally signing a £200,000 deal in 1994, his first advert was 1995's "Welcome Home" (Lineker had recently returned to England having played in Japan). Walkers temporarily named their salt and vinegar crisps after Lineker, labelling them 'Salt & Lineker', in the late 1990s. In 2000, Lineker's Walkers commercials were ranked ninth in Channel 4's poll of the "100 Greatest Adverts".


title: Gary Lineker

text: In May 2014, Lineker established his own production company Goalhanger Films Ltd. with former ITV Controller Tony Pastor. During the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Lineker presented several short videos produced by Goalhanger Films on YouTube with the title "Blahzil".


title: Gary Lineker

text: In May 2015, the company produced a 60-minute-long documentary presented by Lineker titled "Gary Lineker on the Road to FA Cup Glory" for the BBC.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker married Michelle Cockayne in 1986. In May 2006, Cockayne filed for divorce on the grounds of her husband's alleged "unreasonable behaviour", with documents submitted to the court claiming that Lineker's actions in their marriage had caused her "stress and anxiety". Lineker and she have four sons; George, Harry, Tobias and Angus. The couple subsequently stated that the situation was amicable.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In November 1991, George, Lineker's eldest son, survived a rare form of leukaemia whilst he was a baby, and was treated at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Lineker now supports children's cancer charity CLIC Sargent and has appeared in promotional clips encouraging people to give blood. Lineker has been actively involved with other cancer charities such as Leukaemia Busters, where between 1994 and 2005 Gary and Michelle were the charity's patrons. He has also been involved with the Fight for Life and Cancer Research UK charities.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker was made a freeman of the City of Leicester in 1995 and he has been referred to as "Leicester's favourite son".


title: Gary Lineker

text: In October 2002, Lineker backed a £5 million bid to rescue his former club Leicester City, which had recently gone into administration, describing his involvement as "charity" rather than an "ego trip". He stated that he would invest a six-figure sum and that other members of his consortium would invest a similar amount. Lineker met with fans' groups to persuade them to try and raise money to rescue his former club. The club was eventually saved from liquidation. He is now honorary Vice President of Leicester City F.C.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker married Danielle Bux on 2 September 2009, in Ravello, Italy. They went on to win £30,000 for charity on ITV's gameshow "Mr and Mrs". On 13 January 2016, Lineker and Bux announced they were divorcing, after six years of marriage, the reason given being Gary not wanting more children.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In 1985, Lineker was best man at snooker player Willie Thorne's wedding and their close friendship was the subject of the VHS production, "Best of Friends – The Official Story of Gary Lineker & Willie Thorne".


title: Gary Lineker

text: In 2013, Lineker participated in the genealogical programme "Who Do You Think You Are?" during which he discovered an ancestor who was a poacher, and another who was a legal clerk.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In November 2017, Lineker was named in the Paradise Papers in connection with a tax avoidance scheme relating to property owned in Barbados and a company set up in the British Virgin Islands.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker speaks Spanish, which he learnt during his time playing for FC Barcelona, and is an advocate for the teaching of foreign languages in schools.


title: Gary Lineker

text: In April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lineker announced that he was donating £140,000 to the British Red Cross towards research into the virus.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker has been noted for his political views which he shares on Twitter. In December 2016, he was described by Angus Harrison of Vice News as "the British Left's Loudest Voice" for being "both staunchly liberal and resolutely unafraid of making his views known". Using a football analogy, Lineker defined his ideological position as "I make more runs to the left than the right, but never felt comfortable on the wing". After the 2017 United Kingdom general election, in which Theresa May led the Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, Lineker wrote "Anyone else feel politically homeless? Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?"


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker endorsed a remain vote in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. In July 2018, he announced his support for People's Vote, a campaign group calling for a public vote on the final Brexit deal between the UK and the European Union.


title: Gary Lineker

text: On 18 October 2016, Lineker tweeted a rebuttal to a statement made by MP David Davies where Davies suggested refugees entering the UK should undergo dental checks to verify their age: "The treatment by some towards these young refugees is hideously racist and utterly heartless. What's happening to our country?" This led "The Sun" to call for Lineker's sacking from "Match of the Day", claiming that he had breached BBC impartiality guidelines. Lineker is a freelance presenter whose BBC appearances do not concern politics, so in 2018 he was exempt from the corporation's rules regarding impartiality on social media. In 2022, a complaint about a tweet from Lineker that referred to donations to the Conservative Party was upheld by the BBC, on the grounds that it breached social media use guidelines and failed to meet editorial standards of impartiality.


title: Gary Lineker

text: Lineker earned his first cap for England in 1984 against Scotland during the 1983–84 British Home Championship. He played his last game for England in a 2–1 loss against Sweden in a Euro 1992 group stage match. He almost equalled the England goalscoring record, held at the time by Bobby Charlton, in a pre-tournament friendly against Brazil, but he missed a penalty kick, leaving him one goal short of Charlton's total, which was overtaken by Wayne Rooney in 2015.


title: Regular expression

text: A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. Regular expression techniques are developed in theoretical computer science and formal language theory.


title: Regular expression

text: The concept of regular expressions began in the 1950s, when the American mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene formalized the concept of a regular language. They came into common use with Unix text-processing utilities. Different syntaxes for writing regular expressions have existed since the 1980s, one being the POSIX standard and another, widely used, being the Perl syntax.


title: Regular expression

text: Regular expressions are used in search engines, in search and replace dialogs of word processors and text editors, in text processing utilities such as sed and AWK, and in lexical analysis. Most general-purpose programming languages support regex capabilities either natively or via libraries, including Python, C, C++,


title: Regular expression

text: Regular expressions originated in 1951, when mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene described regular languages using his mathematical notation called "regular events". These arose in theoretical computer science, in the subfields of automata theory (models of computation) and the description and classification of formal languages. Other early implementations of pattern matching include the SNOBOL language, which did not use regular expressions, but instead its own pattern matching constructs.


title: Regular expression

text: Regular expressions entered popular use from 1968 in two uses: pattern matching in a text editor and lexical analysis in a compiler. Among the first appearances of regular expressions in program form was when Ken Thompson built Kleene's notation into the editor QED as a means to match patterns in text files. For speed, Thompson implemented regular expression matching by just-in-time compilation (JIT) to IBM 7094 code on the Compatible Time-Sharing System, an important early example of JIT compilation. He later added this capability to the Unix editor ed, which eventually led to the popular search tool grep's use of regular expressions ("grep" is a word derived from the command for regular expression searching in the ed editor: codice_1 meaning "Global search for Regular Expression and Print matching lines"). Around the same time when Thompson developed QED, a group of researchers including Douglas T. Ross implemented a tool based on regular expressions that is used for lexical analysis in compiler design.


title: Regular expression

text: Many variations of these original forms of regular expressions were used in Unix programs at Bell Labs in the 1970s, including vi, lex, sed, AWK, and expr, and in other programs such as Emacs (which has its own, incompatible syntax and behavior). Regexes were subsequently adopted by a wide range of programs, with these early forms standardized in the POSIX.2 standard in 1992.


title: Regular expression

text: In the 1980s, the more complicated regexes arose in Perl, which originally derived from a regex library written by Henry Spencer (1986), who later wrote an implementation of "Advanced Regular Expressions" for Tcl. The Tcl library is a hybrid NFA/DFA implementation with improved performance characteristics. Software projects that have adopted Spencer's Tcl regular expression implementation include PostgreSQL. Perl later expanded on Spencer's original library to add many new features. Part of the effort in the design of Raku (formerly named Perl 6) is to improve Perl's regex integration, and to increase their scope and capabilities to allow the definition of parsing expression grammars. The result is a mini-language called Raku rules, which are used to define Raku grammar as well as provide a tool to programmers in the language. These rules maintain existing features of Perl 5.x regexes, but also allow BNF-style definition of a recursive descent parser via sub-rules.


title: Regular expression

text: The use of regexes in structured information standards for document and database modeling started in the 1960s and expanded in the 1980s when industry standards like ISO SGML (precursored by ANSI "GCA 101-1983") consolidated. The kernel of the structure specification language standards consists of regexes. Its use is evident in the DTD element group syntax. Prior to the use of regular expressions, many search languages allowed simple wildcards, for example "*" to match any sequence of characters, and "?" to match a single character. Relics of this can be found today in the glob syntax for filenames, and in the SQL codice_2 operator.


title: Regular expression

text: Starting in 1997, Philip Hazel developed PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions), which attempts to closely mimic Perl's regex functionality and is used by many modern tools including PHP and Apache HTTP Server.


title: Regular expression

text: Today, regexes are widely supported in programming languages, text processing programs (particularly lexers), advanced text editors, and some other programs. Regex support is part of the standard library of many programming languages, including Java and Python, and is built into the syntax of others, including Perl and ECMAScript. Implementations of regex functionality is often called a regex engine, and a number of libraries are available for reuse. In the late 2010s, several companies started to offer hardware, FPGA, GPU implementations of PCRE compatible regex engines that are faster compared to CPU implementations.


title: Regular expression

text: 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 codice_3, '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, codice_4 is a very general pattern, codice_5 (match all lower case letters from 'a' to 'z') is less general and codice_6 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.


title: Regular expression

text: 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 codice_7 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.


title: Regular expression

text: 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+)?.


title: Regular expression

text: 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 the resulting deterministic finite automaton (DFA) is run on the target text string to recognize substrings that match the regular expression.


title: Regular expression

text: The picture shows the NFA scheme codice_8 obtained from the regular expression codice_9, where "s" denotes a simpler regular expression in turn, which has already been recursively translated to the NFA "N"("s").


title: Regular expression

text: A regular expression, often called a "pattern", specifies a set of strings required for a particular purpose. A simple way to specify a finite set of strings is to list its elements or members. However, there are often more concise ways: for example, the set containing the three strings "Handel", "Händel", and "Haendel" can be specified by the pattern codice_10; we say that this pattern "matches" each of the three strings. However, there can be many ways to write a regular expression for the same set of strings: for example, codice_11 also specifies the same set of three strings in this example.


title: Regular expression

text: The wildcard codice_4 matches any character. For example, codice_17 matches any string that contains an "a", and then any character and then "b"; and codice_18 matches any string that contains an "a", and then the character "b" at some later point.


title: Regular expression

text: These constructions can be combined to form arbitrarily complex expressions, much like one can construct arithmetical expressions from numbers and the operations +, −, ×, and ÷.


title: Regular expression

text: The precise syntax for regular expressions varies among tools and with context; more detail is given in .


title: Regular expression

text: Regular expressions describe regular languages in formal language theory. They have the same expressive power as regular grammars.


title: Regular expression

text: Regular expressions consist of constants, which denote sets of strings, and operator symbols, which denote operations over these sets. The following definition is standard, and found as such in most textbooks on formal language theory. Given a finite alphabet Σ, the following constants are defined


title: Regular expression

text: To avoid parentheses it is assumed that the Kleene star has the highest priority, then concatenation and then alternation. If there is no ambiguity then parentheses may be omitted. For example, codice_27 can be written as codice_28, and codice_29 can be written as codice_30.


title: Regular expression

text: The formal definition of regular expressions is minimal on purpose, and avoids defining codice_13 and codice_15—these can be expressed as follows: codice_37 = codice_38, and codice_39 = codice_40. Sometimes the complement operator is added, to give a "generalized regular expression"; here "R" matches all strings over Σ* that do not match "R". In principle, the complement operator is redundant, because it doesn't grant any more expressive power. However, it can make a regular expression much more concise—eliminating a single complement operator can cause a double exponential blow-up of its length.


title: Regular expression

text: Regular expressions in this sense can express the regular languages, exactly the class of languages accepted by deterministic finite automata. There is, however, a significant difference in compactness. Some classes of regular languages can only be described by deterministic finite automata whose size grows exponentially in the size of the shortest equivalent regular expressions. The standard example here is the languages


title: Regular expression

text: "L" consisting of all strings over the alphabet {"a","b"} whose "k"-from-last letter equals "a". On the one hand, a regular expression describing "L" is given by


title: Regular expression

text: On the other hand, it is known that every deterministic finite automaton accepting the language "L" must have at least 2 states. Luckily, there is a simple mapping from regular expressions to the more general nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) that does not lead to such a blowup in size; for this reason NFAs are often used as alternative representations of regular languages. NFAs are a simple variation of the type-3 grammars of the Chomsky hierarchy.


title: Regular expression

text: In the opposite direction, there are many languages easily described by a DFA that are not easily described by a regular expression. For instance, determining the validity of a given ISBN requires computing the modulus of the integer base 11, and can be easily implemented with an 11-state DFA. However, a regular expression to answer the same problem of divisibility by 11 is at least multiple megabytes in length.


title: Regular expression

text: Given a regular expression, Thompson's construction algorithm computes an equivalent nondeterministic finite automaton. A conversion in the opposite direction is achieved by Kleene's algorithm.


title: Regular expression

text: Finally, it is worth noting that many real-world "regular expression" engines implement features that cannot be described by the regular expressions in the sense of formal language theory; rather, they implement "regexes". See below for more on this.


title: Regular expression

text: As seen in many of the examples above, there is more than one way to construct a regular expression to achieve the same results.


title: Regular expression

text: It is possible to write an algorithm that, for two given regular expressions, decides whether the described languages are equal; the algorithm reduces each expression to a minimal deterministic finite state machine, and determines whether they are isomorphic (equivalent).


title: Regular expression

text: Algebraic laws for regular expressions can be obtained using a method by Gischer which is best explained along an example: In order to check whether ("X"+"Y") and ("X" "Y") denote the same regular language, for all regular expressions "X", "Y", it is necessary and sufficient to check whether the particular regular expressions ("a"+"b") and ("a" "b") denote the same language over the alphabet Σ={"a","b"}. More generally, an equation "E"="F" between regular-expression terms with variables holds if, and only if, its instantiation with different variables replaced by different symbol constants holds.


title: Regular expression

text: Every regular expression can be written solely in terms of the Kleene star and set unions. This is a surprisingly difficult problem. As simple as the regular expressions are, there is no method to systematically rewrite them to some normal form. The lack of axiom in the past led to the star height problem. In 1991, Dexter Kozen axiomatized regular expressions as a Kleene algebra, using equational and Horn clause axioms.


title: Regular expression

text: Already in 1964, Redko had proved that no finite set of purely equational axioms can characterize the algebra of regular languages.


title: Regular expression

text: A regex "pattern" matches a target "string". The pattern is composed of a sequence of "atoms". An atom is a single point within the regex pattern which it tries to match to the target string. The simplest atom is a literal, but grouping parts of the pattern to match an atom will require using codice_41 as metacharacters. Metacharacters help form: "atoms"; "quantifiers" telling how many atoms (and whether it is a "greedy" quantifier or not); a logical OR character, which offers a set of alternatives, and a logical NOT character, which negates an atom's existence; and backreferences to refer to previous atoms of a completing pattern of atoms. A match is made, not when all the atoms of the string are matched, but rather when all the pattern atoms in the regex have matched. The idea is to make a small pattern of characters stand for a large number of possible strings, rather than compiling a large list of all the literal possibilities.


title: Regular expression

text: Depending on the regex processor there are about fourteen metacharacters, characters that may or may not have their literal character meaning, depending on context, or whether they are "escaped", i.e. preceded by an escape sequence, in this case, the backslash codice_42. Modern and POSIX extended regexes use metacharacters more often than their literal meaning, so to avoid "backslash-osis" or leaning toothpick syndrome it makes sense to have a metacharacter escape to a literal mode; but starting out, it makes more sense to have the four bracketing metacharacters codice_41 and codice_44 be primarily literal, and "escape" this usual meaning to become metacharacters. Common standards implement both. The usual metacharacters are codice_45 and codice_42. The usual characters that become metacharacters when escaped are codice_47 and codice_48.


title: Regular expression

text: When entering a regex in a programming language, they may be represented as a usual string literal, hence usually quoted; this is common in C, Java, and Python for instance, where the regex codice_49 is entered as codice_50. However, they are often written with slashes as delimiters, as in codice_51 for the regex codice_49. This originates in ed, where codice_53 is the editor command for searching, and an expression codice_51 can be used to specify a range of lines (matching the pattern), which can be combined with other commands on either side, most famously codice_55 as in grep ("global regex print"), which is included in most Unix-based operating systems, such as Linux distributions. A similar convention is used in sed, where search and replace is given by codice_56 and patterns can be joined with a comma to specify a range of lines as in codice_57. This notation is particularly well known due to its use in Perl, where it forms part of the syntax distinct from normal string literals. In some cases, such as sed and Perl, alternative delimiters can be used to avoid collision with contents, and to avoid having to escape occurrences of the delimiter character in the contents. For example, in sed the command codice_58 will replace a codice_53 with an codice_60, using commas as delimiters.


title: Regular expression

text: The IEEE POSIX standard has three sets of compliance: BRE (Basic Regular Expressions), ERE (Extended Regular Expressions), and SRE (Simple Regular Expressions). SRE is deprecated, in favor of BRE, as both provide backward compatibility. The subsection below covering the "character classes" applies to both BRE and ERE.


title: Regular expression

text: BRE and ERE work together. ERE adds codice_13, codice_15, and codice_63, and it removes the need to escape the metacharacters codice_41 and codice_44, which are "required" in BRE. Furthermore, as long as the POSIX standard syntax for regexes is adhered to, there can be, and often is, additional syntax to serve specific (yet POSIX compliant) applications. Although POSIX.2 leaves some implementation specifics undefined, BRE and ERE provide a "standard" which has since been adopted as the default syntax of many tools, where the choice of BRE or ERE modes is usually a supported option. For example, GNU codice_66 has the following options: "codice_67" for ERE, and "codice_68" for BRE (the default), and "codice_69" for Perl regexes.


title: Regular expression

text: Perl regexes have become a de facto standard, having a rich and powerful set of atomic expressions. Perl has no "basic" or "extended" levels. As in POSIX EREs, codice_41 and codice_44 are treated as metacharacters unless escaped; other metacharacters are known to be literal or symbolic based on context alone. Additional functionality includes lazy matching, backreferences, named capture groups, and recursive patterns.


title: Regular expression

text: In the POSIX standard, Basic Regular Syntax (BRE) requires that the metacharacters codice_41 and codice_44 be designated codice_74 and codice_75, whereas Extended Regular Syntax (ERE) does not.


title: Regular expression

text: The meaning of metacharacters escaped with a backslash is reversed for some characters in the POSIX Extended Regular Expression (ERE) syntax. With this syntax, a backslash causes the metacharacter to be treated as a literal character. So, for example, codice_86 is now codice_41 and codice_88 is now codice_44. Additionally, support is removed for codice_90 backreferences and the following metacharacters are added:


title: Regular expression

text: POSIX Extended Regular Expressions can often be used with modern Unix utilities by including the command line flag -E.


title: Regular expression

text: The character class is the most basic regex concept after a literal match. It makes one small sequence of characters match a larger set of characters. For example, [A-Z] could stand for any uppercase letter in the English alphabet, and \d could mean any digit. Character classes apply to both POSIX levels.


title: Regular expression

text: When specifying a range of characters, such as [a-Z] (i.e. lowercase "a" to uppercase "Z"), the computer's locale settings determine the contents by the numeric ordering of the character encoding. They could store digits in that sequence, or the ordering could be "abc…zABC…Z", or "aAbBcC…zZ". So the POSIX standard defines a character class, which will be known by the regex processor installed. Those definitions are in the following table:


title: Regular expression

text: POSIX character classes can only be used within bracket expressions. For example, [[:upper:]ab] matches the uppercase letters and lowercase "a" and "b".


title: Regular expression

text: An additional non-POSIX class understood by some tools is [:word:], which is usually defined as [:alnum:] plus underscore. This reflects the fact that in many programming languages these are the characters that may be used in identifiers. The editor [[Vim (text editor)|Vim]] further distinguishes "word" and "word-head" classes (using the notation \w and \h) since in many programming languages the characters that can begin an identifier are not the same as those that can occur in other positions: numbers are generally excluded, so an identifier would look like \h\w* or [[:alpha:]_][[:alnum:]_]* in POSIX notation.


title: Regular expression

text: Note that what the POSIX regex standards call "character classes" are commonly referred to as "POSIX character classes" in other regex flavors which support them. With most other regex flavors, the term "character class" is used to describe what POSIX calls "bracket expressions".


title: Regular expression

text: Because of its expressive power and (relative) ease of reading, many other utilities and programming languages have adopted syntax similar to [[Perl]]'s — for example, [[Java (programming language)|Java]], [[JavaScript]], [[Julia (programming language)|Julia]], [[Python (programming language)|Python]], [[Ruby (programming language)|Ruby]], [[Qt (software)|Qt]], Microsoft's [[.NET Framework]], and [[XML Schema (W3C)|XML Schema]]. Some languages and tools such as [[Boost C++ Libraries|Boost]] and [[PHP]] support multiple regex flavors. Perl-derivative regex implementations are not identical and usually implement a subset of features found in Perl 5.0, released in 1994. Perl sometimes does incorporate features initially found in other languages. For example, Perl 5.10 implements syntactic extensions originally developed in PCRE and Python.


title: Regular expression

text: In Python and some other implementations (e.g. Java), the three common quantifiers (codice_14, codice_15 and codice_13) are [[greedy algorithm|greedy]] by default because they match as many characters as possible. The regex codice_98 (including the double-quotes) applied to the string


title: Regular expression

text: matches the entire line (because the entire line begins and ends with a double-quote) instead of matching only the first part, codice_99. The aforementioned quantifiers may, however, be made "lazy" or "minimal" or "reluctant", matching as few characters as possible, by appending a question mark: codice_100 matches only codice_99.


title: Regular expression

text: In Java and Python 3.11+, quantifiers may be made "possessive" by appending a plus sign, which disables backing off (in a backtracking engine), even if doing so would allow the overall match to succeed: While the regex codice_102 applied to the string


title: Regular expression

text: matches the entire line, the regex codice_103 does , because codice_104 consumes the entire input, including the final codice_105. Thus, possessive quantifiers are most useful with negated character classes, e.g. codice_106, which matches codice_99 when applied to the same string.


title: Regular expression

text: Another common extension serving the same function is atomic grouping, which disables backtracking for a parenthesized group. The typical syntax is . For example, while matches both and , only matches because the engine is forbidden from backtracking and so cannot try setting the group to "w" after matching "wi".


title: Regular expression

text: Possessive quantifiers are easier to implement than greedy and lazy quantifiers, and are typically more efficient at runtime.


title: Regular expression

text: Many features found in virtually all modern regular expression libraries provide an expressive power that exceeds the [[regular language]]s. For example, many implementations allow grouping subexpressions with parentheses and recalling the value they match in the same expression (""). This means that, among other things, a pattern can match strings of repeated words like "papa" or "WikiWiki", called "squares" in formal language theory. The pattern for these strings is codice_108.


title: Regular expression

text: The language of squares is not regular, nor is it [[context-free language|context-free]], due to the [[Pumping lemma for context-free languages|pumping lemma]]. However, [[pattern matching]] with an unbounded number of backreferences, as supported by numerous modern tools, is still [[context-sensitive language|context sensitive]]. The general problem of matching any number of backreferences is [[NP-complete]], growing exponentially by the number of backref groups used.


title: Regular expression

text: However, many tools, libraries, and engines that provide such constructions still use the term "regular expression" for their patterns. This has led to a nomenclature where the term regular expression has different meanings in [[formal language|formal language theory]] and pattern matching. For this reason, some people have taken to using the term "regex", "regexp", or simply "pattern" to describe the latter. [[Larry Wall]], author of the Perl programming language, writes in an essay about the design of [[Raku (programming language)|Raku]]:


title: Regular expression

text: Other features not found in describing regular languages include assertions. These include the ubiquitous and , used since at least 1970, as well as some more sophisticated extensions like lookaround that appeared in 1994. Lookarounds define the surrounding of a match and don't spill into the match itself, a feature only relevant for the use case of string searching. Some of them can be simulated in a regular language by treating the surroundings as a part of the language as well.


title: Regular expression

text: The look-ahead assertions codice_109 and codice_110 have been attested since at least 1994, starting with Perl 5. The look-behind assertions codice_111 and codice_112 are attested since 1997 in a commit by Ilya Zakharevich to Perl 5.005.


title: Regular expression

text: There are at least three different [[algorithm]]s that decide whether and how a given regex matches a string.


title: Regular expression

text: The oldest and fastest relies on a result in formal language theory that allows every [[nondeterministic finite automaton]] (NFA) to be transformed into a [[deterministic finite automaton]] (DFA). The DFA can be constructed explicitly and then run on the resulting input string one symbol at a time. Constructing the DFA for a regular expression of size "m" has the time and memory cost of [[Big O notation|"O"]](2), but it can be run on a string of size "n" in time "O"("n"). Note that the size of the expression is the size after abbreviations, such as numeric quantifiers, have been expanded.


title: Regular expression

text: An alternative approach is to simulate the NFA directly, essentially building each DFA state on demand and then discarding it at the next step. This keeps the DFA implicit and avoids the exponential construction cost, but running cost rises to "O"("mn"). The explicit approach is called the DFA algorithm and the implicit approach the NFA algorithm. Adding caching to the NFA algorithm is often called the "lazy DFA" algorithm, or just the DFA algorithm without making a distinction. These algorithms are fast, but using them for recalling grouped subexpressions, lazy quantification, and similar features is tricky. Modern implementations include the re1-re2-sregex family based on Cox's code.


title: Regular expression

text: The third algorithm is to match the pattern against the input string by [[backtracking]]. This algorithm is commonly called NFA, but this terminology can be confusing. Its running time can be exponential, which simple implementations exhibit when matching against expressions like that contain both alternation and unbounded quantification and force the algorithm to consider an exponentially increasing number of sub-cases. This behavior can cause a security problem called [[Regular expression Denial of Service]] (ReDoS).


title: Regular expression

text: Although backtracking implementations only give an exponential guarantee in the worst case, they provide much greater flexibility and expressive power. For example, any implementation which allows the use of backreferences, or implements the various extensions introduced by Perl, must include some kind of backtracking. Some implementations try to provide the best of both algorithms by first running a fast DFA algorithm, and revert to a potentially slower backtracking algorithm only when a backreference is encountered during the match. GNU grep (and the underlying gnulib DFA) uses such a strategy.


title: Regular expression

text: Sublinear runtime algorithms have been achieved using [[Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm|Boyer-Moore (BM) based algorithms]] and related DFA optimization techniques such as the reverse scan. GNU grep, which supports a wide variety of POSIX syntaxes and extensions, uses BM for a first-pass prefiltering, and then uses an implicit DFA. Wu [[agrep]], which implements approximate matching, combines the prefiltering into the DFA in BDM (backward DAWG matching). NR-grep's BNDM extends the BDM technique with Shift-Or bit-level parallelism.


title: Regular expression

text: A few theoretical alternatives to backtracking for backreferences exist, and their "exponents" are tamer in that they are only related to the number of backreferences, a fixed property of some regexp languages such as POSIX. One naive method that duplicates a non-backtracking NFA for each backreference note has a complexity of time and space for a haystack of length n and k backreferences in the RegExp. A very recent theoretical work based on memory automata gives a tighter bound based on "active" variable nodes used, and a polynomial possibility for some backreferenced regexps.


title: Regular expression

text: In theoretical terms, any token set can be matched by regular expressions as long as it is pre-defined. In terms of historical implementations, regexes were originally written to use [[American Standard Code for Information Interchange|ASCII]] characters as their token set though regex libraries have supported numerous other [[character set]]s. Many modern regex engines offer at least some support for [[Unicode]]. In most respects it makes no difference what the character set is, but some issues do arise when extending regexes to support Unicode.


title: Regular expression

text: Regexes are useful in a wide variety of text processing tasks, and more generally [[string processing]], where the data need not be textual. Common applications include [[data validation]], [[data scraping]] (especially [[web scraping]]), [[data wrangling]], simple [[parsing]], the production of [[syntax highlighting]] systems, and many other tasks.


title: Regular expression

text: While regexes would be useful on Internet [[Search engine (computing)|search engine]]s, processing them across the entire database could consume excessive computer resources depending on the complexity and design of the regex. Although in many cases system administrators can run regex-based queries internally, most search engines do not offer regex support to the public. Notable exceptions include [[Google Code Search]] and [[Exalead]]. However, Google Code Search was shut down in January 2012.


title: Regular expression

text: The specific syntax rules vary depending on the specific implementation, [[programming language]], or [[Library (computing)|library]] in use. Additionally, the functionality of regex implementations can vary between [[Software versioning|version]]s.


title: Regular expression

text: Because regexes can be difficult to both explain and understand without examples, interactive websites for testing regexes are a useful resource for learning regexes by experimentation.


title: Regular expression

text: This section provides a basic description of some of the properties of regexes by way of illustration.


title: Regular expression

text: Also worth noting is that these regexes are all Perl-like syntax. Standard [[#POSIX Basic Regular Expressions|POSIX]] regular expressions are different.


title: Regular expression

text: Unless otherwise indicated, the following examples conform to the [[Perl]] programming language, release 5.8.8, January 31, 2006. This means that other implementations may lack support for some parts of the syntax shown here (e.g. basic vs. extended regex, codice_132 vs. codice_133, or lack of codice_134 instead of [[POSIX]] codice_135).


title: Regular expression

text: The syntax and conventions used in these examples coincide with that of other programming environments as well.


title: Regular expression

text: Regular expressions can often be created ("induced" or "learned") based on a set of example strings. This is known as the [[induction of regular languages]] and is part of the general problem of [[grammar induction]] in [[computational learning theory]]. Formally, given examples of strings in a regular language, and perhaps also given examples of strings "not" in that regular language, it is possible to induce a grammar for the language, i.e., a regular expression that generates that language. Not all regular languages can be induced in this way (see [[language identification in the limit]]), but many can. For example, the set of examples {1, 10, 100}, and negative set (of counterexamples) {11, 1001, 101, 0} can be used to induce the regular expression 1⋅0* (1 followed by zero or more 0s).


title: Myasthenia gravis

text: Myasthenia gravis (MG) is a long-term neuromuscular junction disease that leads to varying degrees of skeletal muscle weakness. The most commonly affected muscles are those of the eyes, face, and swallowing. It can result in double vision, drooping eyelids, trouble talking, and trouble walking. Onset can be sudden. Those affected often have a large thymus or develop a thymoma.


title: Myasthenia gravis

text: Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease of the neuro-muscular junction which results from antibodies that block or destroy nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (AChR) at the junction between the nerve and muscle. This prevents nerve impulses from triggering muscle contractions. Most cases are due to immunoglobulin G1 (IgG1) and IgG3 antibodies that attack AChR in the postsynaptic membrane, causing complement-mediated damage and muscle weakness. Rarely, an inherited genetic defect in the neuromuscular junction results in a similar condition known as congenital myasthenia. Babies of mothers with myasthenia may have symptoms during their first few months of life, known as neonatal myasthenia. Diagnosis can be supported by blood tests for specific antibodies, the edrophonium test, or a nerve conduction study.


title: Myasthenia gravis

text: MG is generally treated with medications known as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, such as neostigmine and pyridostigmine. Immunosuppressants, such as prednisone or azathioprine, may also be used. The surgical removal of the thymus may improve symptoms in certain cases. Plasmapheresis and high-dose intravenous immunoglobulin may be used during sudden flares of the condition. If the breathing muscles become significantly weak, mechanical ventilation may be required. Once intubated acetylcholinesterase inhibitors may be temporarily held to reduce airway secretions.


title: Myasthenia gravis

text: MG affects 50 to 200 per million people. It is newly diagnosed in three to 30 per million people each year. Diagnosis has become more common due to increased awareness. MG most commonly occurs in women under the age of 40 and in men over the age of 60. It is uncommon in children. With treatment, most of those affected lead relatively normal lives and have a normal life expectancy. The word is from the Greek "mys", "muscle" and "astheneia" "weakness", and the Latin "gravis", "serious".


title: Myasthenia gravis

text: The initial, main symptom in MG is painless weakness of specific muscles, not fatigue. The muscle weakness becomes progressively worse during periods of physical activity and improves after periods of rest. Typically, the weakness and fatigue are worse toward the end of the day. MG generally starts with ocular (eye) weakness; it might then progress to a more severe generalized form, characterized by weakness in the extremities or in muscles that govern basic life functions.