Create and test regular expressions interactively even with live search and replace


Regular expressions are becoming the method of choice for a wide variety of text processing tasks. They are powerful, subtle, some may argue too cryptic, but once mastered they greatly simplify text processing.

This page allows you to create and test regular expressions quickly and interactively. It can be thought of as a “regular expression calculator”, a handy way to find out whether a particular expression will produce the results you expect.

In the first phase, the user pastes the desired sample text into the source window (or uses the default text), then enters a search expression and presses the “Enter” key or clicks the “Search” button. The results window will display any matching areas of the sample text highlighted like this. This feature allows the user to tune the search expression interactively — and quickly.

In the second phase, the user enters a replacement expression and presses the “Enter” key or clicks the “Replace” button. The results window will show the replacements.

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