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

~
~
igx

Test String

Code Generator

Language

Generated Code

use strict; my $str = '<div class="blog-list-item blog"><header class="entry-title"> <h1>Welcome to our website</h1> </header><article id="entry-72" class="entry post-72 page et-bg-layout-dark et-white-bg"><div class="jumbotron row"> <div class="col-md-8"> <ul> <li>You have a pending job on your neck?&hellip;</li> <li>Do your company need a website makeover ?&hellip;</li> <li>Or a competitive web application ? ?&hellip;</li> <li>Do you need a customized plugin, or a tweak ?&hellip;</li> <li>Maybe you want a personal website ?&hellip;</li> <li>Or a graphic for your new project ?&hellip;</li> </ul> <div class="bg-primary well"> <h4 class="text-center text-white shadow">Track your project as we work it to perfection...</h4> </div> </div> <div class="pull-right col-md-4"> <h4 class="bg-primary text-white well">Other services we offer</h4> {ACCESS{type=500}} <ul> <li>SEO work for an existing website or new</li> <li>Bulk SMS</li> <li>E-currency exchange</li> <li>Facebook AD</li> <li>Google AD</li> </ul> {/ACCESS}</div> {RAW{say=email,access=500}} {RAW} <a class="btn button large tall green" href="client-area">Place new Job now as we deliver at the quickest <em>reasonable time</em></a>{/RAW}</div></article></div>'; my $regex = qr~#opening tag \{(RAW|ACCESS|DWNLINK|MODL|\w+) #optional attributes (?> \{ ([^}]*) } )? } #optional text and closing tag (?: ( #text:= any char except "{", or a "{" not followed by /commandname [^{]*+ (?>\{(?!/?\1[{}])[^{]*)*? ) #closing tag \{/\1} )?~ixp; 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