Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet — The Only Regex Guide You Need

Regular expressions (regex) are one of the most powerful tools in a developer's toolkit — and also one of the most confusing. This cheat sheet covers everything you need.

Basic Patterns

Pattern	Meaning	Example
.	Any character	h.t matches "hat", "hit", "hot"
\d	Any digit	\d{3} matches "123"
\w	Word character	\w+ matches "hello"
\s	Whitespace	\s+ matches spaces, tabs
^	Start of string	^Hello matches "Hello world"
$	End of string	world$ matches "Hello world"

Quantifiers

Pattern	Meaning
*	0 or more
+	1 or more
?	0 or 1
{3}	Exactly 3
{2,5}	Between 2 and 5

Common Patterns

Email Validation

^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$

URL Validation

https?:\/\/[\w\-]+(\.[\w\-]+)+[\/\w\-.?&=%#]*

Phone Number (US)

^\+?1?[-.\s]?\(?\d{3}\)?[-.\s]?\d{3}[-.\s]?\d{4}$

IP Address

^(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4]\d|[01]?\d\d?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4]\d|[01]?\d\d?)$

Test Your Regex

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