Analyze and Understand Other People’s Regular Expression Patterns Learn Regex By Example

When you need to edit a regular expression written by somebody else, or if you are just curious to understand or study a regex you encountered, copy and paste it into RegexBuddy. If the regex is used as part of an application's source code, just copy the entire string or regex operator. RegexBuddy will properly extract the regex from the string. E.g. when working with Java code, copy the Java string containing the regex and select "Paste as C-style string" in RegexBuddy. RegexBuddy then properly removes the quotes and escape characters.

As soon as you paste in the regex, RegexBuddy's regex tree will give you a clear analysis of the regular expression. Click on the regular expression, or on the regex tree, to highlight corresponding parts. Collapse part of the tree to get a good overview of complex regular expressions. If you are new to regular expressions, this is an excellent way to learn by example.

When the brief descriptions of the regex tree are not clear enough, just click the Explain Token button to access RegexBuddy's detailed regular expression tutorial. You will find answers to all your questions there. (At least, those questions concerning regular expressions.)

Export the regex tree to an HTML file to document the regular expression outside of RegexBuddy. In JavaScript-enabled browsers, moving the mouse will highlight corresponding parts, as you can see below.

<B[^>]*>(.*?)</B>

• Match the characters "<B" literally
• Match a single character not present in the list: one of the characters ">"
  • Between zero and unlimited times, as many times as possible, giving back as needed (greedy)
• Match the character ">" literally
• Match the regular expression below and capture its match into backreference 1
  • Match any single character
    • Between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible, expanding as needed (lazy)
• Match the characters "</B>" literally

Of course, the only way to be 100% sure if a regex matches a particular piece of text is to try it and find out. Just click on the Test tab, click the Highlight button, and type in the text or open the file you want to test the regex against. You will see right away what matches, and what does not.

Once you understand the pattern, store the regular expression into a RegexBuddy library for later reuse. Or, edit the regex and replace the original.

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