Regex Tester

Test and debug regular expressions against sample text with live match highlighting.

Knowledge Base & Educational Companion: Understanding regular expressions

A regular expression (regex) is a pattern that describes a set of strings. Regex powers search, validation and text extraction across almost every programming language.

1. Patterns and metacharacters

Characters like '.', '*', '+' and '\d' match categories of text rather than literal characters, letting one short pattern match many possible strings.

2. Flags change behaviour

Flags like 'g' (global), 'i' (case-insensitive) and 'm' (multiline) modify how the engine searches, turning a single-match test into a full sweep of the input.

3. Capture groups

Parentheses create capture groups that extract parts of a match — the backbone of parsing dates, URLs and structured text out of raw strings.

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