regex - What's the meaning of a number after a backslash in a regular expression?

Question

(a|b)1

What does 1 mean in this expression?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8624345/whats-the-meaning-of-a-number-after-a-backslash-in-a-regular-expression

Answer 1

1 - it means the first capturing group in the matched expression. would be the nth capturing group. (Note that would be whole match). In many engines, the upperlimit for n is 9, but some support up to 99 as well.

When used in regex like (a|b)1, it means that after a or b, the next character should be the first captured group, which is a or b so the regex here would match aa or bb.