
We use the term “string” to indicate the text that the regular expression is applied to. Matches are highlighted in blue on this site. It is the most basic pattern, simply matching the literal text regex. This is actually a perfectly valid regex. On this website, regular expressions are shaded gray as regex. Text Patterns and MatchesĪ regular expression, or regex for short, is a pattern describing a certain amount of text. This quick start explains the syntax supported by the most popular regular expression flavors. When two applications use a different implementation of regular expressions, we say that they use different “regular expression flavors”. Many applications and programming languages have their own implementation of regular expressions, often with slight and sometimes with significant differences from other implementations. Each topic in the quick start corresponds with a topic in the tutorial, so you can easily go back and forth between the two. For detailed information, consult the regular expressions tutorial. Obviously, this brief introduction cannot explain everything there is to know about regular expressions. This quick start gets you up to speed quickly with regular expressions.
