Please enable JavaScript to use regex101
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Regular Expression
/
([a-z ]*)characters
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gi
Input 1
1
New
this is a test string that doesn't match anything? Why? Well, it misses the magical word. this is a test string that doesn't match any characters? Funny huh? ' isn't within the character group, so the capture group starts after it. Try adding ' to the character group! This time, however, I'm going to tell you much about characters. Not just characters, but interesting characters! I can even talk about characters that meet other characters. This is a great example of capture groups. Since . and , aren't within the character group, they aren't matched. However, since we're searching for multiple matches, each is matched individually. the last line, however has 2x "characters" and since the ? is missing behind *, * is greedy and ends at the last occurance of "characters", not the first. Add a ? after * and see what happens. Now change * into + and "characters" will be ignored, since " isn't within the capture group. One last thing, see the match information to the right? Those are captured by the capture groups and can be extracted from the string easily.