As documented under Regular Expressions:
These markers stand for word boundaries. They match the beginning and end of words, respectively. A word is a sequence of word characters that is not preceded by or followed by word characters. A word character is an alphanumeric character in the
alnum
class or an underscore (_
).
Since )
is not a word character, the pattern \)[[:>:]]
can never be matched; [[:>:]]\)
, on the other hand, would be matched.