Expressions & Classes

At the core of Mapchar is the expression parser.

Literal Characters

Literal characters produce themselves. For example, admin literally yields admin. If you concatenate it with numbers, it produces combinations.

$ mapchar 'admin/d'
admin0
admin1
...
admin9

Built-in Character Classes

To easily reference standard character sets, Mapchar provides built-in tokens initialized with a forward slash /.

Symbol	Meaning	Example / Resulting Output
/l	Letters	a–z and A–Z
/a	Lowercase letters	a–z
/A	Uppercase letters	A–Z
/d	Digits	0–9
/D	Non-zero digits	1–9
/h	Hexadecimal (lower)	0–9, a–f
/H	Hexadecimal (upper)	0–9, A–F
/s	Whitespace	(Space)
/o	Octal digits	0–7
/p	Special characters	!@#$%^&*-_+=
/b	Newline	\n

Custom Classes and Unions

You can construct your own custom character classes by wrapping items in brackets [...]. For example, [abc] generates the characters a, b, or c.

Mixing Built-in Classes inside Brackets Built-in tokens naturally expand inside brackets.

$ mapchar '[/d/a_]'
# Yields all digits, lowercase letters, and underscores: 0, 1..., a, b..., _

Unions (Alternatives) Use the pipe character | to separate full-word alternatives inside brackets. Each option acts as a discrete, indivisible block.

$ mapchar '[admin|root|123]'
admin
root
123

This allows grouping multiple payloads logically.

Literal Groups

If you need an entire word sequence to be treated strictly as a single permutation unit without interpreting inner unions, you can wrap it in literal parenthesis (...). This is highly useful when combined with quantifiers.

$ mapchar '(admin){3}'
adminadminadmin

Quantifiers

Control repetition using brace syntax. The syntax supports minimum and maximum repetitions.

• {N} — Repeat exactly N times.

• {min,max} — Repeat between min and max times (inclusive).

• ? — Sugar syntax for exactly 0 or 1 time (optional).

Examples:

$ mapchar '[XYZ]{3}'
# Yields: XXX, XXY, XXZ, XYX... (27 permutations)

$ mapchar '[XYZ]{1,2}'
# Yields: X, Y, Z, XX, XY, XZ... (12 permutations)

$ mapchar '(admin)?[12]'
# Yields: 1, 2, admin1, admin2

Expression Alternation

You can combine multiple independent expressions in a single line or template using the double-pipe operator ||. This is useful for generating wordlists from disparate patterns without creating separate files.

$ mapchar 'admin/d{2}||guest/d{2}'
# Yields: admin00, admin01... guest98, guest99...

Unlike the single pipe | inside brackets (which works at the character/class level), the double pipe || operates at the top level of the generator, effectively chaining full expressions together.

Escaping

Need to output a reserved token like /d, [, }, or ^? Escape it using a backslash \.

$ mapchar '\/d/d'
/d0
/d1
...