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

/
/
g

Test String

Code Generator

Language

Generated Code

# coding=utf8 # the above tag defines encoding for this document and is for Python 2.x compatibility import re regex = r"<([^\/> ]+)\s*([^>]*)\s*(?:\/>|>(.*)<\/\1>)" test_str = ("<tag attrib=\"text\" attrib2 = \"othertext\"><innertag>value</innertag></tag>\n" "<tag2 />\n" "<tag3/>\n" "<tag4>value</tag4>\n" "<tag5></tag5>\n" "<tag2 attrib=\"text\" attrib2 = \"othertext\" />\n" "<tag3 attrib=\"text\" attrib2 = \"othertext\"/>\n" "<tag5 attrib=\"text\" attrib2 = \"othertext\"></tag5>\n\n\n\n" "<([^\\/> ]+)\\s*([^>]*)\\s*(?:\\/>|>(.*)<\\/\\1>) (with global) finds all tags in scope\n\n" "1st group is tagname\n" "2nd group is attributes\n" "3rd group (if it exists) is value of the tag\n\n" "Apply pattern again on 3th group to find internal tags (recurse in the code to parse entire xml!)\n\n\n" "Apply pattern below on 2nd group to find all attributes:\n\n" "\\s+([^<>\\=\" ]+)\\s*=\\s*\"([^\"]*)\" (with global) finds attributes\n\n" " 1st group is attributename\n" " 2nd group is attributevalue") matches = re.finditer(regex, test_str) for matchNum, match in enumerate(matches, start=1): print ("Match {matchNum} was found at {start}-{end}: {match}".format(matchNum = matchNum, start = match.start(), end = match.end(), match = match.group())) for groupNum in range(0, len(match.groups())): groupNum = groupNum + 1 print ("Group {groupNum} found at {start}-{end}: {group}".format(groupNum = groupNum, start = match.start(groupNum), end = match.end(groupNum), group = match.group(groupNum))) # Note: for Python 2.7 compatibility, use ur"" to prefix the regex and u"" to prefix the test string and substitution.

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