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

/
/
gmu

Test String

Code Generator

Language

Generated Code

import java.util.regex.Matcher; import java.util.regex.Pattern; public class Example { public static void main(String[] args) { final String regex = "(^(?<date>\\d{1,2}\\/\\d{1,2}\\/\\d{1,2}),\\s(?<time>\\d{1,2}:\\d{1,2})\\s-\\s(?<user>.*?):\\s)|(?<word>\\w+(?:\\'\\w+)?|[\\x{1F600}-\\x{1F64F}]|[\\x{1F300}-\\x{1F5FF}]|[\\x{1F680}-\\x{1F6FF}]|[\\x{2600}-\\x{26FF}]|[\\x{2700}-\\x{27BF}]|[^\\w\\s~\"!@#$%*()_+-=¹²³§ªº`^\\{\\}[\\]<>,.;:?\\/\\\\\\|\\n\\r\\t])"; final String string = "3/30/20, 17:06 - Me: Hi brow! I need to test some regex.\n" + "3/30/20, 17:06 - John Doe: 👍👍👍 Let's do it!\n" + "3/30/20, 17:08 - Me: ⚡️🦄🧀🏀🤪🎺🎪💾🚽📎💕💯✅ 🇯🇵 🕔➡️👶🚴👌👽\n" + "3/30/20, 17:10 - Someone: 🐵🙈🙉🙊🐒 We're talking emoji language?\n" + "https://regex101.com/library"; final Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex, Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.UNICODE_CASE); final Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(string); while (matcher.find()) { System.out.println("Full match: " + matcher.group(0)); for (int i = 1; i <= matcher.groupCount(); i++) { System.out.println("Group " + i + ": " + matcher.group(i)); } } } }

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 Java, please visit: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html