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
No Match

/
/
gm

Test String

Code Generator

Language

Generated Code

use strict; my $str = 'München, Germany Göteborg, Sweden Québec City, Canada São Paulo, Brazil Reykjavík, Iceland İstanbul, Turkey Marseille, France Kraków, Poland Córdoba, Spain Zürich, Switzerland Brno, Czech Republic Ljubljana, Slovenia Český Krumlov, Czech Republic Tromsø, Norway Görlitz, Germany äöüÄÖÜßẞáéíóúàèìòùâêîôûÁÉÍÓÚÀÈÌÒÙÂÊÎÔÛãõñÑçÇ Č芚ŽžĎŇňŘřěĚŸİ磳ƵƷąćęłńśźżĄĆĘŁŃŚŹŻẞ مرحبا بوينوس دياس Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina Görlitz, Germany Québec City, Canada Łódź, Poland Reykjavík, Iceland Gdańsk, Poland Malmö, Sweden České Budějovice, Czech Republic Žilina, Slovakia Barcelona, Spain Göteborg, Sweden Málaga, Spain Bratislava, Slovakia Kraków, Poland Bordeaux, France Köln (Cologne), Germany Reykjavík, Iceland Helsinki, Finland Praha (Prague), Czech Republic Lisboa (Lisbon), Portugal'; my $regex = qr/^[a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%^&*()_+\-=\[\]{};':"\\|,.<>\/?\sÀ-ÿĀ-ſƀ-ɏḀ-ỿɐ-ʯ]*$/mp; if ( $str =~ /$regex/g ) { print "Whole match is ${^MATCH} and its start/end positions can be obtained via \$-[0] and \$+[0]\n"; # print "Capture Group 1 is $1 and its start/end positions can be obtained via \$-[1] and \$+[1]\n"; # print "Capture Group 2 is $2 ... and so on\n"; } # ${^POSTMATCH} and ${^PREMATCH} are also available with the use of '/p' # Named capture groups can be called via $+{name}

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 Perl, please visit: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html