title: Why does this regular expression not capture arithmetic operators?
body: <p>I'm trying to capture tokens from a pseudo-programming-language script, but the <code>+-*/</code>, etc are not captured.</p>
  
  <p>I tried this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[a-z_]\w*|"([^"\r\n]+|"")*"|\d*\.?\d*|\+|\*|\/|\(|\)|&amp;|-|=|,|!
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>For example i have this code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>for i = 1 to 10
  test_123 = 3.55 + i- -10 * .5
  next
  msg "this is a ""string"" with quotes in it..."
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in this part of code the regular expression has to highlight:
   valid variablenames,
   strings enclosed with quotes,
   <strong>operators like (),+-*/!</strong>
   numbers like 0.1 123 .5 10.</p>
  
  <p>the result of the regular expression has to be:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>'<strong>for</strong>',
    '<strong>i</strong>',
    '<strong>=</strong>',
    '<strong>1</strong>',
    '<strong>to</strong>',
    '<strong>10</strong>',
    '<strong>test_123</strong>',
    '<strong>=</strong>',
    '<strong>3.55</strong>',
    '<strong>+</strong>'
    etc....</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>the problem is that the operators are not selected if i use this regular expression...</p>