Kleene star

<text> (Or “Kleene closure”, named after Stephen Kleene) The postfix “*” operator used in regular expressions, Extended Backus-Naur Form, and similar formalisms to specify a match for zero or more occurrences of the preceding expression.

For example, the regular expression “be*t” would match the string “bt”, “bet”, “beet”, “beeeeet”, and so on.