Regular Expression Cheat Sheet (.NET)

Regular Expression Cheat Sheet (.NET)

Metacharacters Defined MChar Definition ^ Start of a string. $ End of a string. . Any character (except /n newline) | Alternation. {...} Explicit quantifier notation. [...] Explicit set of characters to match. (...) Logical grouping of part of an expression. * 0 or more of previous expression. + 1 or more of previous expression. ? 0 or 1 of previous expression; also forces minimal matching when an expression might match several strings within a search string. / Preceding one of the above, it makes it a literal instead of a s pe cial character. Preceding a s pe cial matching character, see below.

Metacharacter Examples Pattern Sample Matches ^abc abc, abcdefg, abc123, ... abc$ abc, endsinabc, 123abc, ... a.c abc, aac, acc, adc, aec, ... bill|ted ted, bill ab{2}c abbc a[bB]c abc, aBc (abc){2} abcabc ab*c ac, abc, abbc, abbbc, ... ab+c abc, abbc, abbbc, ... ab?c ac, abc a/sc a c

 

Character Esca pe s http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpgenref/html/cpconcharacterescapes.asp
Esca pe d Char	Description
ordinary characters	Characters other than . $ ^ { [ ( | ) ] } * + ? / match themselves.
/a	Matches a bell (alarm) /u0007.
/b	Matches a backspace /u0008 if in a []; otherwise matches a word boundary (between /w and /W characters).
/t	Matches a tab /u0009.
/r	Matches a carriage return /u000D.
/v	Matches a vertical tab /u000B.
/f	Matches a form feed /u000C.
/n	Matches a new line /u000A.
/e	Matches an esca pe /u001B.
/040	Matches an ASCII character as octal (up to three digits); numbers with no leading zero are backreferences if they have only one digit or if they correspond to a capturing group number. (For more information, see Backreferences.) For example, the character /040 represents a space.
/x20	Matches an ASCII character using hexadecimal representation (exactly two digits).
/cC	Matches an ASCII control character; for example /cC is control-C.
/u0020	Matches a Unicode character using a hexadecimal representation (exactly four digits).
/*	When followed by a character that is not recognized as an esca pe d character, matches that character. For example, /* is the same as /x2A.

 

Character Classes http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpgenref/html/cpconcharacterclasses.asp
Char Class	Description
.	Matches any character except /n. If modified by the Singleline option, a pe riod character matches any character. For more information, see Regular Expression Options.
[aeiou]	Matches any single character included in the s pe cified set of characters.
[^aeiou]	Matches any single character not in the s pe cified set of characters.
[0-9a-fA-F]	Use of a hyphen (–) allows s pe cification of contiguous character ranges.
/p{name}	Matches any character in the named character class s pe cified by {name}. Supported names are Unicode groups and block ranges. For example, Ll, Nd, Z, IsGreek, IsBoxDrawing.
/P{name}	Matches text not included in groups and block ranges s pe cified in {name}.
/w	Matches any word character. Equivalent to the Unicode character categories [/p{Ll}/p{Lu}/p{Lt}/p{Lo}/p{Nd}/p{Pc}]. If ECMAScript-compliant behavior is s pe cified with the ECMAScript option, /w is equivalent to [a-zA-Z_0-9].
/W	Matches any nonword character. Equivalent to the Unicode categories [^/p{Ll}/p{Lu}/p{Lt}/p{Lo}/p{Nd}/p{Pc}]. If ECMAScript-compliant behavior is s pe cified with the ECMAScript option, /W is equivalent to [^a-zA-Z_0-9].
/s	Matches any white-space character. Equivalent to the Unicode character categories [/f/n/r/t/v/x85/p{Z}]. If ECMAScript-compliant behavior is s pe cified with the ECMAScript option, /s is equivalent to [ /f/n/r/t/v].
/S	Matches any non-white-space character. Equivalent to the Unicode character categories [^/f/n/r/t/v/x85/p{Z}]. If ECMAScript-compliant behavior is s pe cified with the ECMAScript option, /S is equivalent to [^ /f/n/r/t/v].
/d	Matches any decimal digit. Equivalent to /p{Nd} for Unicode and [0-9] for non-Unicode, ECMAScript behavior.
/D	Matches any nondigit. Equivalent to /P{Nd} for Unicode and [^0-9] for non-Unicode, ECMAScript behavior.