RegexPal: Web-Based Regex Testing Reinvented
Yes I know, there are many other JavaScript regex testers available. Why did I create yet another? RegexPal brings several new things to the table for such web-based apps, and in my (biased) opinion it's easier to use and more helpful towards learning regular expressions than the others currently available. Additionally, most other such tools are very slow for the kind of data I often work with. They might appear fast when displaying 10 matches, but what about 100, 1000, or 5000? Try generating 5,000 matches (which is easy to do with an any-character pattern such as a dot) in your favorite existing web-based tool and see if your browser ever recovers (doubtful). The same task takes RegexPal less than half a second, and what's more, results overlay the text while you're typing it.
At the moment, RegexPal is short on features, but here are the highlights:
- Real-time regex syntax highlighting with backwards and forwards context awareness.
- Lightning-fast match highlighting with alternating styles.
- Inverted matches (match any text not matched by the regex).
I'm not sure when I'll add additional features, but there are lots of things I'm considering. If there is something you'd like to see, let me know.
A few things to be aware of:
- The approach I've used for scrollable rich-text editing (which I haven't seen elsewhere) is fast but a bit buggy. Firefox 2 and IE7 have the least issues, but it more or less works in other browsers as well.
- The syntax highlighting generally marks corner-case issues that create cross-browser inconsistencies as errors even if they are the result of browser bugs or missing behavior documentation in ECMA-262 v3.
- There are different forms of line breaks cross-platform/browser. E.g., Firefox uses
\neven on Windows where nearly all programs use\r\n. This can affect the results of certain regexes.
At least for me, RegexPal is lots of fun to play with and helps to make learning regular expressions easy through its instant feedback. I encourage you to just go play with it and discover its results on your own, but for the curious, I'll keep rambling…
Regex syntax parsing (needed for the syntax highlighting) is somewhat complex, due to the numerous backwards and forwards context awareness issues involved. Take, for example, the pattern \10. What does it mean?
- Backreference 10, if not inside a character class and at least 10 capturing groups are opened before that point.
- Backreference 1, followed by a literal "0", if not inside a character class and between 1 and 9 capturing groups are opened before that point.
- Octal character index 10 (decimal 8), if inside a character class, or if no capturing groups are opened before that point.
- The three literal characters "\", "1", and "0", if preceded by an unescaped "\" character.
- An incomplete token in a couple other situations.
Another example is the "-" character. Outside a character class it's always a literal hyphen, but inside a character class…
- It creates a range between tokens if:
- There is a preceding and following token in the class, or it's preceded by a token and is the last character in an unclosed character class (caveats follow).
- It's a literal character if:
- It's the first or last character in the class.
- It's preceded by an unescaped "\".
- It follows a token which is the end index for a range.
- It follows a hyphen which creates a range.
- It's an error if:
- It's creating a range between tokens in reverse character index order (e.g.,
z-a,@-!,\uFFFF-\b, or\127-\cB). - It would otherwise create a range, but it's followed or preceded by a token which represents more than one character index (e.g.,
\d). In fact, in some cases browsers take this to mean that the hyphen should be treated as a literal, but browser bugs cause it to be handled inconsistently so RegexPal flags it as a range error.
- It's creating a range between tokens in reverse character index order (e.g.,
Here are a few more things which aren't errors but are flagged as such:
- Empty, top-level alternation, except at the end of the pattern, where such an alternation is ignored when highlighting matches in order to create a less surprising experience while the user is in the middle of constructing the regex. Empty, top-level alternation is flagged as an error because it effectively truncates the regex at that point (since it will always match). If a zero-length, top-level alteration is really needed, there are other easy ways to do that more explicitly.
- Lookaround quantifiers (e.g., the plus sign in
(?!x)+). This would be an actual error with some regex libraries (e.g., PCRE), and although that's not the case in most web browsers, such constructs add no value. As a result, RegexPal flags such quantifiers as an error, since they are almost certainly a user mistake. \cwhen not followed by A–Z,\xwhen not followed by two hex characters, and\uwhen not followed by four hex characters. Although these do not cause most browsers to throw errors, they are handled inconsistently cross-browser and are hence flagged as errors. They would almost certainly be a user mistake even if the cross-browser issues didn't exist.
Credit to osteele.com from where the text of the short-and-sweet Quick Reference is based, and to RegexBuddy from JGsoft for inspiring many of RegexPal's features. The name RegexPal is, in part, a nod to RegexBuddy, but also selected because it contains both "regex" and "regexp." 
Comment by Blair Mitchelmore on 10 August 2007:
You know what’s funny? I came upon RegexPal today in my Programming RSS feed and before the link was open I came here to see what you had to say about it. It turns out you made it! Your intense passion for and knowledge of regexes is so profound that now whenever I think of regex, I think of this site. Well done, sir.
Comment by Bowen on 12 August 2007:
Steve is a master of Regexery. Nevertheless, whenever I think of having too much time on my hands, I think of this site.
Comment by Christoph on 28 August 2007:
Nicely done, Steve. You might be the only person I know who loves regex more than I do.
Comment by geeky on 7 September 2007:
I just found myself having to write a regex for work, and suddenly I remembered Ryan mentioning RegexPal to me a few weeks ago. I tried it out and it works like a charm. Nicely done, sir.
Comment by Jon Cage on 11 March 2008:
Fantastic tool and I agree; much easier to use than any other I’ve found. One quick question – is it possible to tell it to search over the end of lines? I’ve been building a suite of regexes to parse c++ headers to retrieve the public interfaces. It would have been nice to be able to highlight properly the following matched comment:
/* some multiline comment
*/
which my software is able to strip
with the regex your site helped me build
The regex your tool helped me build worked, but it would be even better still if there was a “Treat multiline input as a single string” option.
One other enhancement that would be fantastic would be the ability to pipe one regex output into a second edit box and perform another regex on that. Add that and you’ve got a very powerful tool to build multi-level regexes …and I would be a very grateful little developer!
Comment by Jon Cage on 11 March 2008:
Ooops.. I just realised you can do the multiline thing with the “Dot matches all” option!
Comment by Linebreak on 23 June 2008:
The problem with using visual tools to justify something capable of matching invisible items… what happens when you want to test the matching of invisible items with a visual tool (highlighting)?
http://is.gd/DRc
Comment by Linebreak on 23 June 2008:
Hi, I also posted about the linebreak issue earlier. I recommend having a ‘show all characters’ or ‘show invisible character highlights’ option to remedy that.
Also I noticed this ‘bug’ in the wordwrap behavior of textarea, you can see it here:
http://is.gd/DW8
Comment by Bob on 24 June 2008:
A great addition would be a little notification of the milliseconds or microseconds it took to find all the matches within the haystack. The speed of different regex patterns is something I always want to test as well.
Comment by orklah on 21 July 2008:
I find your testers by google and it’s very useful!
I’m French and I will give the URL at all of my friends!
Thank you very much!
Comment by k4emic on 6 August 2008:
Before anything else, a million thanks to Steve for this great tool for webdevs all over the world!
I was trying out lookbehind (?<=) and found that it did not work even though that lookahead works normally. Anyone else having this problem?
Furthermore, I’ve been wondering about the various colors used in the regexpal application. I know for certain that yellow highlight is for positive results, but I haven’t figured out what blue highlights do at the time being.
Comment by Steven Levithan on 6 August 2008:
Thanks for the suggestions, bug reports, and compliments, everyone.
@k4emic, JavaScript doesn’t support lookbehind, so RegexPal correctly highlights your group as an error (red). As for the highlighting of match results, they simply alternate between yellow and blue. This allows you to easily determine where one match ends and the next begins, even when two matches are adjacent to each other.
Comment by Billy Chow on 15 November 2008:
Whoa!
You did a great job!
Thank you!
Comment by David on 4 December 2008:
You have a great online tester there. I love that it not only highlights matches – but different sets of matches are different colors! Forget the stuff I was using – your site is now my new tester!
Comment by cancelbubble on 10 February 2009:
Couldn’t get it to work, nothing in my test data would highlight (though my source regex would). I think it would be much more useful if on page load it was populated with an example.
Comment by matt on 1 April 2009:
I LOVE YOUR REGEX TESTER. It has some highlighting issues in FF but works correctly with IE. I’ve only experienced the highlighting issue once though, the highlight was shifted. It worked fine in IE though. If I can find the regex and data ill be sure to post it for you! THANK AGAIN!
Comment by Alfredoski on 6 October 2009:
Thank you for your great tool!!!
I only would add a message indicating that yellow colour means a match with the expression.
Comment by Sascha Ziemann on 10 December 2009:
Great tool!
Comment by Thomas Schoch on 10 December 2009:
I’m enthused! That is what I’ve always been looking for.
Comment by Venicios Ribeiro on 12 March 2010:
How to insert it on $(document.body).text() to find texts with a regular expression?
Comment by Maicon Peixinho on 24 June 2010:
Hey man, I have a suggestion for this wonderful tool.
What do you think of the groups highlight the text with regexp in the same colors!?
Thanks!
Comment by Confused on 12 July 2010:
Guess I am stupid . . . So, when I enter my pattern and then my test data what do I do next? I have no idea how to tell it “GO!”
Comment by Steven Levithan on 13 July 2010:
@Confused, it goes automatically. See http://bit.ly/c9gmZw for an example of how matches are highlighted. If you’re not seeing any matches, most likely that means your regex doesn’t match within your target text.
Comment by Michael on 8 September 2010:
If you paste a regular expression in first and then paste test data in second it does nothing. You must modify the regular expression in order to get it to “GO.” Trivial enough once you realize that’s the trick but initially confusing.
Comment by Philip on 11 October 2010:
Not sure what all the colours about?
I’ve been using http://www.regexr.com so far
Comment by iltie on 22 November 2010:
Is there a way to copy the matched result to clipboard?
Comment by Ian on 3 December 2010:
What does yellow mean, and what does blue mean? A legend would be helpful. Cool site tho.
Comment by LucyDJ on 20 December 2011:
Nice Editor saves my time thank you.
Comment by jamesvalue on 1 February 2012:
This tool will really reduce my trial and error time when writing regular expressions. This tool is totally awesome! Thanks for your work.
Comment by Pravin on 29 February 2012:
A great addition would be a little notification of the milliseconds or microseconds it took to find all the matches within the haystack. The speed of different regex patterns is something I always want to test as well.
Comment by Ken on 17 April 2012:
Since your site is meant for people trying to learn RegEx it’d be great if you could include a legend to inform us what the different colors mean.
Comment by Herk on 21 April 2012:
Great tool. Thank you for making it. I agree with others that the alternating color thing is confusing initially, since there is no legend.
Comment by Jim Camomile on 1 August 2012:
I have heard from several others that this is really useful but they already had a decent grasp on regex. I don’t really understand regex at all though I have stumbled through making it work a few times. Anyway, I have tried to figure out how this thing works and have pretty much failed to get the point of what it is doing. Maybe having a few quick examples of how to use it would help.
Comment by Telanis on 2 October 2012:
Looks like highlighting is broken. After typing my first non-matching line (I had ‘m’ and ‘s’ on), every new line I enter is highlighted whether matching or not, and all the same color.
Comment by Putnik on 6 November 2012:
Thank you! Despite there are many regex testers around, yours is the best!
Comment by SFtest on 25 November 2012:
Yep…sadly nothing is highlighted anymore.
Broken web app,
with no support or answer from author
…abandoned app?
Using Firefox 16.02
XP-PRO SP3
Comment by Steven Levithan on 25 November 2012:
@SFtest, RegexPal hasn’t been updated in a while, but it’s not abandoned. I just tested it in Firefox 15 and 17 (16 not immediately available), Chrome 23, and IE 9. It’s working fine in all of them.
For people wondering about the alternating match colors, there is no difference between yellow and blue matches. The colors alternate simply so that you can tell where one match ends and the next match starts, when they are directly adjacent. (Previously mentioned in this comment.)
Comment by A on 13 January 2013:
You should add (?P) syntax to the site.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php (see example #3)
Comment by Margaret on 25 January 2013:
I also haven’t had any trouble with running RegExPal, and I think it’s a great tool. I do have a feature request – it would be even more useful if it incorporated the look-behind scripts you posted separately. As it is I’m finding it difficult to get my head around exactly what they’re doing.