Regular Expression Examples

Expression Result
^They Finds They at the beginning of a line.

Ishmael$ Finds Ishmael at the end of a line.

Wh..e Finds White, Whale, While, Whole, or any other text beginning with Wh, ending with e, and having two characters between.

^Wh..e Finds White, Whale, While, Whole, and so on, at the beginning of a line.

se* Finds s, se, see, seee, or any other text beginning with an s followed by zero or more occurrences of e. Finds sea too.

se+ Finds se, see, seee, or any other text beginning with an s followed by one or more occurrences of e. Finds sea too. It does not find “s” stranded without an “e”.

[MobyDick] Finds M, o, or any other letter in “Moby Dick”. Does not find anything in “Ishmael”. [MobyDIck] would find I in “Ishmael”.

[MobyDick]+oby Finds Moby in “Moby Dick”.

d[^aeiu]ck Finds dock but not “Dick” or “duck”.

\<[Mm]o+[Bb]*y Finds text that begins a word with M or m, then has one or more of o, zero or more of B or b, and a y. Finds Moby but not “Mory”.

sea|whale|leg Finds text that contains sea, whale, or leg.

\$ Finds a dollar sign. The backslash turns the $ into a literal dollar sign instead of a symbol for an end of line in a regular expression.

{his}{[ -z]+}{[kl]eg} Finds “his wooden leg” or “his whale of a leg” or “his whole keg”, as well as other such text. Except for the curly brackets, this expression is the same as his[ -z]+[kl]eg. The curly brackets divide the expression into sub-expressions, which may be referenced by number in Replacement Expressions.

([0-9]) matches (0), (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8) and (9)

([0-9]*) matches (), (0), (123), (2512), etc.