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

Generated Code

import re regex = re.compile(r"\.-?[_a-zA-Z]+[_a-zA-Z0-9-]*\s*\{(.*?)}", flags=re.MULTILINE) test_str = ("<body> <style type=\"text/css\"> .csB51708B8{text-align:left;text-indent:0pt;margin:0pt 0pt 12pt 0pt;line-height:16.5pt} .csBBD4C4C1{color:#2B2E2F;background-color:transparent;font-family:'Lucida Sans Unicode';font-size:10.5pt;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;} .csFC0FFCA7{text-align:left;margin:8pt 0pt 12pt 0pt;line-height:16.5pt;list-style-type:decimal;color:#2B2E2F;background-color:transparent;font-family:'Lucida Sans Unicode';font-size:10.5pt;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal} .csB4C51EC2{color:#2B2E2F;background-color:transparent;font-family:'Lucida Sans Unicode';font-size:10.5pt;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration: none;} .csC575EB8B{color:#0000FF;background-color:transparent;font-family:'Lucida Sans Unicode';font-size:10.5pt;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration: underline;} .cs67EAC646{text-align:left;margin:8pt 0pt 8pt 0pt;line-height:16.5pt;list-style-type:decimal;color:#2B2E2F;background-color:transparent;font-family:'Lucida Sans Unicode';font-size:10.5pt;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal} .cs896AFE57{text-align:left;text-indent:0pt;margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt;line-height:16.5pt} .csE2621F37{text-align:left;text-indent:0pt;margin:11pt 0pt 11pt 0pt;line-height:16.5pt} .cs2654AE3A{text-align:left;text-indent:0pt;margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt} .csC8F6D76{color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-family:Calibri;font-size:11pt;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;} .cs8D3F54E5{color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-family:Verdana;font-size:8pt;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;} </style> <p class=\"csB51708B8\"><span class=\"csBBD4C4C1\">\n" "...\n" "</body> ") 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