Regular Expressions 101

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An explanation of your regex will be automatically generated as you type.
Detailed match information will be displayed here automatically.
  • All Tokens
  • Common Tokens
  • General Tokens
  • Anchors
  • Meta Sequences
  • Quantifiers
  • Group Constructs
  • Character Classes
  • Flags/Modifiers
  • Substitution
  • A single character of: a, b or c
    [abc]
  • A character except: a, b or c
    [^abc]
  • A character in the range: a-z
    [a-z]
  • A character not in the range: a-z
    [^a-z]
  • A character in the range: a-z or A-Z
    [a-zA-Z]
  • Any single character
    .
  • Alternate - match either a or b
    a|b
  • Any whitespace character
    \s
  • Any non-whitespace character
    \S
  • Any digit
    \d
  • Any non-digit
    \D
  • Any word character
    \w
  • Any non-word character
    \W
  • Non-capturing group
    (?:...)
  • Capturing group
    (...)
  • Zero or one of a
    a?
  • Zero or more of a
    a*
  • One or more of a
    a+
  • Exactly 3 of a
    a{3}
  • 3 or more of a
    a{3,}
  • Between 3 and 6 of a
    a{3,6}
  • Start of string
    ^
  • End of string
    $
  • A word boundary
    \b
  • Non-word boundary
    \B

Regular Expression
Processing...

Test String

Code Generator

Language

Generated Code

import re regex = re.compile(r"\((?:[^()]++|(?R))*\)", flags=re.MULTILINE) test_str = ("SELECT Name AS [Object Name], Switch([Type]=5,'Query',[Type]=-32768,'Form',[Type]=6,'Table') AS [Object Type], Switch([Type]=5,1,[Type]=-32768,2,[Type] In (1,4,6),6) AS [Object Type ID], Left(Name,4) as Prefix, LTrim(RTrim(Mid([Name],5,30))) as Suffix\n\n" "SELECT \"Amy's code is righteous.\", left(\"abc\",1), right('source code',4), \"Bill's code has been righteous too.\"\n\n" "----------\n\n" "End goal is to replace all commas in SQL SELECT clause with comma+linefeed but ignore commas inside parenthesis (which may be nested).\n\n" "\\((?:[^()]++|(?R))*\\)\n\n" "This expression will find all of the nested parentheis using recursion. I want to do one of these two options:\n" " a) Replace all commas in the matched groups with the pipe \"|\" character, \n" " then with two simple StrReplace() calls: replace all commas with comma+linefeed, then replace all | with comma.\n" "OR\n" " b) Select all text that is not in the matched group and replace commas with comma+linefeed.\n\n" "I'm using AutoHotkey and the RegExReplace() function.") matches = regex.finditer(test_str) for match_num, match in enumerate(matches, start=1): print(f"Match {match_num} was found at {match.start()}-{match.end()}: {match.group()}") for group_num, group in enumerate(match.groups(), start=1): print(f"Group {group_num} found at {match.start(group_num)}-{match.end(group_num)}: {group}")

Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for Python, please visit: https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html