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

use strict; my $str = 'Yes: http://google.it <a href="http://www.it.com">algo</a> https://something.com https://www.something.com <a href="iaaaaaaaat.com">hola</a> http://something.com http://www.something.com <a href=\'www.it.com\'>hola</a> https://something.gov <a href=\'https://www.something.gov\'>Hola</a> http://something.gov <a href="ftp://longurljapanese.jp">hollaaaa</a> <a href="it.it">hollaaaa</a> http://www.something.gov https://something.org https://www.something.org http://something.org http://www.something.org https://something.net https://www.something.net http://something.net http://www.something.net https://something.edu https://www.something.edu http://something.edu http://www.something.edu https://something.biz https://www.something.biz http://something.biz http://www.something.biz something.biz www.something.biz something.edu www.something.edu something.net www.something.net something.org www.something.org something.gov www.something.gov something.com www.something.com No: https://www.something http://www.something'; my $regex = qr/href=["'](https?:\/\/(?:www\.|(?!www))[^\s\.]+\.[^\s"']{2,}|(?!ftp:\/\/)[^\s]+\.[^\s'"]{2,})/p; 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