Free Online Regex Tester

See your matches highlighted directly in the sample text as you refine your pattern, making it much faster to debug a tricky regular expression than testing blind in code. Useful for developers validating input formats, extracting data, or learning regex syntax.

How to Use the Regex Tester

1. Type or paste your regular expression pattern into the pattern field.
2. Paste the sample text you want to test it against.
3. Toggle flags such as global, ignore case, multiline, or dot-all to match your real use case.
4. Watch matches highlight directly in the sample text as you edit the pattern.
5. Check the match list below to inspect each full match and its individual capture groups.

Who uses this tool: Developers use it to validate form inputs like emails and phone numbers before shipping them, data engineers use it to build extraction patterns for scraping structured values out of raw text, and students learning regex syntax use the live highlighting to see exactly why a pattern does or doesn't match, instead of guessing from a terminal. QA engineers also use it to double-check that a validation pattern rejects the bad inputs it's supposed to catch, and technical writers reach for it to confirm a regex example in documentation actually behaves the way the surrounding text claims before publishing it.