A Regex Cheat Sheet for Developers

Regular expressions (regex) are a superpower for text pattern-matching, but the syntax is genuinely hard to remember. This cheat sheet covers the patterns you'll actually reach for day to day.

Common building blocks

• \d — any digit (0-9)
• \w — a word character (letters, digits, underscore)
• \s — whitespace (space, tab, newline)
• + — one or more times
• * — zero or more times
• ? — optional (zero or one time)
• ^ and $ — start and end of the string
• [...] — a character set, e.g. [a-z] matches any lowercase letter

Ready-to-use patterns

Email:        ^[\w.+-]+@[\w-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$
URL:          ^https?:\/\/[\w.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}(\/\S*)?$
Phone (IN):   ^[6-9]\d{9}$
Hex color:    ^#([A-Fa-f0-9]{6}|[A-Fa-f0-9]{3})$
Strong pwd:   ^(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*\d).{8,}$

Writing a regex is one thing, testing it is another — a single typo can break the whole pattern. In our Regex Tester you can enter both a pattern and a test string live and see matches highlighted instantly, without running console.log() in a browser console.