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

@"
"
gxs

Test String

Code Generator

Language

Generated Code

use strict; my $str = '<html> <body> <div> <br /> <ul id="matchMe" type="square"> <li>stuff...</li> <li>more stuff</li> <li> <div> <p>Lorem ipsum< /p> <hr class="important" / > <span>still more</span> <ul> <li>Another &gt;ul&lt;, oh my!</li> <li>...</li> </ul> </div> </li> </ul> </div> </body> </html>'; my $regex = qr/(?=<ul\s+id=""matchMe""\s+type=""square""\s*>) # match start with <ul id="matchMe"... (?> # atomic group / don't backtrack (faster) <!-- .*? --> | # match xml / html comment <[^>]*/\s*> | # self closing tag (?<opentag><(?!\s*/)[^>]*[^/]>) | # push opening xml tag (?<-opentag><\s*/[^>]*[^/]>) | # pop closing xml tag [^<>]* # something between tags )* # match as many xml tags as possible (?(opentag)(?!)) # ensure no 'opentag' groups are on stack/xsp; 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