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

/
/
gi

Test String

Substitution

Processing...

Code Generator

Language

Generated Code

$re = '/(my date of birth is|my birthdate is|my birthday is|my bday is|i was born on|date of birth is|dob is|birthdate is|my dob is|birthday|birth date is)*(\s)*(((0)[0-9])|((1)[0-2])|(January|Jan|February|Feb|March|Mar|April|Apr|May|June|Jun|July|Jul|August|Aug|September|Sep|October|Oct|November|Nov|December|Dec))(\/|.|-)([0-2][0-9]|(3)[0-1])(\/|.|-)\d{2,4}/i'; $str = '1. dob is 12-19-1994 2. 1234 3. 4567 4. 09/19/1993 5. Mar 14 1954 6. asd 7. dob is 12-12-1234 8. 4456 9. 352345 12345678 09-19-1993 09.19.1993 "09.19.1993" january 10 2021 09191993'; $subst = "$1"; $result = preg_replace($re, $subst, $str); echo "The result of the substitution is ".$result;

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 PHP, please visit: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php