The Complete Guide to Regular Expressions

Regular expressions (regex) are powerful pattern-matching tools. Master them to unlock advanced text processing capabilities.

Basic Metacharacters

  • . - Any character
  • \d - Any digit
  • \w - Any word character
  • \s - Whitespace

Anchors

  • ^ - Start of string
  • $ - End of string

Quantifiers

  • * - Zero or more
  • + - One or more
  • ? - Zero or one
  • {n} - Exactly n times

Practical Examples

Email: ^[\w.-]+@[\w.-]+\.\w+$

Phone: \d{3}[-.]?\d{3}[-.]?\d{4}

Conclusion

Practice makes perfect. Use our regex tester to experiment!