Regex Tester

A regular expression (regex) is a compact pattern used to search, match, validate and extract text. Instead of writing custom code to check whether a string "looks like" an email, a phone number or a date, you describe the shape of that text once with a regex and let the engine find every match for you.

What is a regular expression?

A regex is a string of special characters and literals that defines a search pattern. For example, the pattern ^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$ matches text that starts with four digits, a dash, two digits, another dash and two digits — i.e. a date like 2026-07-17.

Why would you use it?

• Validation — check that user input is a valid email, URL, phone number or password.
• Search & extraction — find every price, hashtag or link inside a block of text.
• Cleaning data — remove unwanted characters or normalize formats before importing.
• Replacing text — swap dates, phone formats or placeholders in one pass.
• Learning — experiment safely with patterns before using them in your code.

This tester runs entirely in your browser. Type a pattern, paste the text you want to check, and see every match highlighted instantly with its position and capture groups — nothing is sent to a server.