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

Substitution

Processing...

Code Generator

Language

Generated Code

use strict; my $str = '<!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <title>Online regex tester and debugger: JavaScript, Python, PHP, and PCRE</title> // comment <meta name="keywords"// content="javascript,regex,regular expression,debugger,explainer,helper,tester,match,pcre,python,editor"> <meta name="description" content="Onli//ne regex tester, debugger with highlighting for PHP, PCRE, Python and JavaScript."> <meta name="author" content="Firas Dib"> // this is a comment <meta property="twitter:card" content="summary"> '; my $regex = qr~\n? */{2,} .*~p; my $subst = ''; my $result = $str =~ s~$regex~$subst~rg; print "The result of the substitution is' $result\n";

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