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JULY 26, 2023 / #REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

The Regular Expressions Book – RegEx for

JavaScript Developers [Full Book]
Kolade Chris

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 If you want to master regular expressions and understand ADVERTISEMENT

how they work in JavaScript, this book's for you.

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 Regular expressions can be intimidating when you first encounter them.
When I started learning to code, I gave up on regular expressions twice.

While that was partly because I was intimidated by regular expressions at

first, the tutorials and courses I used never taught them in a way I could
understand.

In fact, before some tutorials start teaching regex, they complain about
regex and how tough they can be. And there's no better way to discourage a
learner than that.

In this book, you won't just see how to use regex in a regex testing tool like
regexpal or regex101. You'll also see how they works in JavaScript. This is
what many courses and tutorials tailored for regex in JavaScript lack. As
you see how they work using a regex tester, you'll also see how they work in
JavaScript.

You can also apply what you learn in this book to other programming
languages like Python, PHP, and so on. All you need to do is to know about
how the regex engine of that language works. You'll also need to
understand the methods and functions the language uses for working with
regular expressions.

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 To get the most out of this book, make sure you read it in order because
each chapter builds upon the previous ones. I have also arranged the
chapters according to how difficult they are. So, you will find simpler
concepts first and more advanced concepts later.

Happy reading!

Table Of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction to Regular Expressions

What are Regular Expressions?

A Brief History of Regular Expressions

What are the Uses of Regular Expressions?

Flavors of Regular Expressions

Tools for Working with Regular Expressions

Basic Concepts of Regular Expressions

Chapter 2: How to Match Literal Characters and Character Sets in

Regular Expressions

What are Literal Characters in Regular Expressions?

How to Match Literal Characters in RegEx Testers

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 Character Set Matching

Chapter 3: Regular Expressions Flags

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The global Flag

The case-insensitive Flag

The multi-line and single-line Flags

The unicode Flags

The sticky Flags

Chapter 4: How to Use Regular Expressions in JavaScript

How to Create Regular Expressions in JavaScript

Methods of the RegExp() Constructor

Properties of the RegExp() Constructor

String Methods for Working with Regular Expressions

How to Match Literal Characters in JavaScript Regular

Expressions

How to Use Character Sets in JavaScript Regular Expressions

Chapter 5: Metacharacters, Quantifiers, Repeated Matches, and

Optional Matches

What are Metacharacters?

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 The Word and Non-word Metacharacters

The Anchor Metacharacters

The Digit and Non-digit Metacharacters

The Square Brackets Metacharacter

The Word Boundary and Non-word Boundary

Metacharacters

The Parenthesis Metacharacter

The Space and Non-space Metacharacters

The Pipe Metacharacter

How to Match Repeated Characters With Qunatifiers

How to Specify Match Quantity with the Curly Braces

Metacharacter

The Wildcard Metacharacter

Greediness and Laziness in Regular Expressions

Chapter 6: Grouping and Capturing in Regex

How to Reference Captured Groups with Backreferences

How to Use the d Flag and hasIndices Property With

Groups

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 Chapter 7: Lookaround Groups: Lookaheads and Lookbehinds

What are Lookaround Groups?

What is a Lookahead Group?

What is a Lookbehind Group?

Chapter 8: Regex Best Practices and Troubleshooting

Best Practices to Consider While Writing Regular

Expressions

How to Write Accurate Regular Expressions

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Chapter 9: Applications of Regular Expressions

A Better Way to Match Dates

How to Match US Zip Codes

How to Match Email Addresses

How to Match Passwords

Form Validation with Regex

Article Table of Contents Generator

Glossary and References

Glossary of Terms

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 Quick Reference of Metacharacters and Quantifiers

Chapter 1: Introduction to Regular

Expressions
What are Regular Expressions?
You might see this written as regular expressions, regex, or RegExp – but all
refer to the same thing.

Regex are a sequence of characters for matching a part of a string or the

whole string. Matching strings with regular expressions might require more
than just "characters". Many times, you will need to use a special set of
characters called "metacharacters" and "quantifiers".

Because regular expressions are a powerful tool, you can use then to do
much more than just "matching strings" when you combine regex with
programming languages.

Almost all the main programming languages of the modern era have built-in
support for regular expressions. Some programming languages might even
have specific libraries that help you work more conveniently with regex.

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 Apart from using regular expressions in programming languages, other
tools that let you use regular expressions are:

Text Editors and IDEs: for search and search and replace in VS Code,
Visual Studio, Notepad++, Sublime Text, and others.

Browser Developer Tools: mostly in-browser search (with

extensions or add-ons) and search within the developer tools.

Database Tools: for data mining.

RegEx Testers: you can paste in text and write the regular
expressions to match them – which is a very good way to learn
regular expressions. This book explores that option quite a bit.

A Brief History of Regular Expressions

Regular expressions have a rich and fascinating history that has already
spanned more than seven decades. This history continues to evolve
alongside the development of computer science and programming
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languages.

The concept of regular expressions traces back to the 1950s. American

mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene introduced them as a notation for
defining patterns in formal languages. Kleene's work also formed the
foundation for theoretical computer science.
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 In the early 1960s, the first implementations of regular expressions
emerged. Ken Thompson, a computer scientist at Bell Labs, developed a
text editor named QED that utilized regular expressions for pattern
matching. QED's capabilities provided a way to search and manipulate texts
more efficiently.

The concept gained further popularity when Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
created the Unix operating system in the early 1970s.

They incorporated regular expressions into various Unix utilities, most

notably the ed text editor and later the sed stream editor. These tools
allowed users to perform complex text manipulation tasks, significantly
enhancing the efficiency and power of text processing.

In 1973, Thompson collaborated with Alfred Aho and Peter Weinberger to

develop a new tool called grep (global regular expression print) as part of
the Unix toolkit.

Grep allowed users to search files for specific patterns using regular
expressions. The simplicity and effectiveness of grep made it a widely
adopted tool. It also established regular expressions as a standard feature
in Unix-based systems.

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 As computer systems and programming languages evolved, regular
expressions became integrated into various software development
environments. In the late 1970s, the AWK programming language was
created. AWK inspired Larry Wall to create Perl and make it available to the
public in 1987.

Wall recognized the value of regular expressions for text manipulation and
integrated regex into Perl.

Perl's integration of regular expressions into its syntax made it a popular

language for text matching and data extraction tasks. This integration
formed the foundation of PCRE (Perl-compatible regular expressions), a
flavor and library of regular expressions you can use in some programming
languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, Java, and others.

Regular expressions continued to evolve and find applications beyond Unix

and Perl. In the 1980s, the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO) developed the POSIX standard, which included a specification for
regular expressions. This standardization ensured compatibility and
consistency across different implementations and systems.

With the rise of the internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, regular
expressions found widespread use in web development and data
processing. They became an essential component of many scripting
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 languages, providing developers with powerful tools for text processing,
form validation, and data extraction from web pages. ADVERTISEMENT

For example, JavaScript had always had a version of PCRE built in for
working with regular expressions. But by 1999, with the release of
ECMAScript, the RegExp() constructor was introduced. This gave
JavaScript developers the ability to start using regular expressions directly
in their code, in the JavaScript way.

In the early 2000s, tools and libraries specifically focused on regular

expressions emerged, making it easier for developers to work with them.
Libraries like PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) provided
enhanced features and better performance, further expanding the usage
and capabilities of regular expressions.

Today, regular expressions are an integral part of programming languages

and text-processing tools like your code editor. They are supported by
almost all major programming languages, including Java, C#, Ruby, and PHP.

Integrated development environments (IDEs) and code editors like Visual

Studio, VS Code, and Notepad++ also now include regex-based search and
search and replace functionalities, simplifying the process of finding and
manipulating texts in code.

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 The history of regular expressions demonstrates their evolution from
theoretical concepts to practical tools that have revolutionized text
processing and pattern matching.

From the early developments at Bell Labs and Unix to their integration into
popular programming languages, regular expressions have become an
essential tool in the hands of developers and system administrators. Regex
empowers them to handle complex text-based tasks efficiently.

With the ongoing advancements in computing and the continuous demand

for efficient text processing, regular expressions will likely remain a
fundamental part of the technology landscape for years to come.

What are the Uses of Regular Expressions?

Regular expressions are quite versatile and flexible. This makes it possible
to apply them to various tasks in various domains such as computer
programming, data processing, text editing, and web development.

Those applications and uses include but are not limited to the following:

String Matching: This is one of the most common ways developers use
regular expressions. This is also a good way to learn regular expressions.

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 You can paste some texts into a regex engine and write the regex to match a
part of the text or the whole text. You can also search for strings that
contain specific character sequences, start or end with certain characters,
or match complex patterns.

This makes regular expressions valuable for tasks like searching for
keywords, validating input against specific patterns, or filtering data based
on string patterns

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Password Strength Validation: You can use regular expressions for
validating the strength of passwords in websites and applications.

By defining a set of rules using regular expressions, developers can enforce

specific password requirements, such as a minimum number of characters,
a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special
characters.

Form Validation: Validating inputs of a form or standalone inputs is another

popular way developers use regular expressions.

Regular expressions provide a concise and efficient way to ensure that

input data follows specific patterns or formats. Whether it's validating
usernames, email addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, postal

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 codes, or other inputs, regular expressions can help you enforce validation
rules and maintain data integrity.

Text Search and Manipulation: Regular expressions excel at searching for

specific patterns within text and performing manipulations based on those
matches. They are a powerful tool for tasks such as data mining, log
analysis, and text processing.

Whether you need to find occurrences of particular words or phrases,

extract structured data from text, analyze content, or perform string
matching, regular expressions offer efficient pattern-matching capabilities

Working with URLs and URIs: Since URLs and URIs are an integral part of
web development, regular expressions can help in validating, parsing, and
manipulating them. This enables developers to ensure the correctness and
structure of web addresses, validate whether a string is a valid URL, and
help extract specific components such as the domain, path, query
parameters, or fragments.

This functionality is particularly useful in tasks like URL routing, rewriting,

or extracting data from query parameters.

Search and Replace in IDEs and Text Editors: Regular expressions offer
sophisticated search capabilities. This enables developers to locate specific
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 patterns (such as words with specific prefixes or sequences of characters)
and then replace the matches with a specified text. This is built into modern
text editors like VS Code and Notepad++.

Data Extraction and Scraping: Regular expressions play a significant role in

data extraction and web scraping. They allow developers to extract specific
information from unstructured or semi-structured text by defining patterns
to match desired data.

They are also valuable when extracting data from sources like HTML or
XML documents, as they enable efficient retrieval of information based on
defined patterns.

Syntax Highlighting: Regular expressions are commonly used in IDEs and

text editors to provide syntax highlighting. This ends up helping users to
visually distinguish different parts of a code or document by assigning
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specific constructs.

Regular expressions are used to identify and match these language-specific

patterns, making code more readable and enhancing the overall editing
experience.

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 Flavors of Regular Expressions
The term "flavors of regular expressions" refers to the specific
implementation and syntax variations of regular expressions in different
programming languages, libraries, or tools.

While the core concept of regular expressions remains the same, the details
of how regular expressions are written and interpreted can vary between
different environments.

Each flavor of regular expressions may have its own set of metacharacters,
syntax rules, and additional features beyond the basic functionality.

These differences can include variations in the syntax for character classes,
metacharacters, capturing groups, and assertions, as well as additional
capabilities like named capturing groups, look-ahead, and look-behinds.

There are many flavors of regular expressions available today. Some of

them are:

Basic Regular Expressions (BRE): this flavor is commonly found in

Unix tools such as sed and grep. It uses a limited set of
metacharacters and features. The wildcard ( . ) and zero or more ( * )
metacharacters are available in it.

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 Extended Regular Expressions (ERE): ERE is an extension of BRE. It
provides additional metacharacters and features. In addition to the
metacharacters available in BRE, ERE introduces features like
grouping with parentheses ( ( ) ), alternation with the pipe symbol
( | ), and the use of curly braces ( {} ) to specify repetition ranges.

Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE): PCRE is a popular

flavor supported by various programming languages such as Perl,
Python, PHP, and JavaScript. PCRE extends the basic regular
expression syntax with powerful features like lookahead and look-
behind assertions, backreferences, non-capturing groups, and the
use of \b for word boundaries.

JavaScript Regular Expressions: JavaScript has its regular

expression flavor which is similar to PCRE but with a few
differences. It supports basic features like character classes with
square brackets ( [ ] ), metacharacters ( * , + , ? , and others), and
capturing groups ( ( ) ). JavaScript also provides additional features
like the global flag /g to perform multiple matches, and the ignore
case flag /i for case-insensitive matching

Python Regular Expressions: Python's re module implements a

flavor that is similar to PCRE but with a few variations. It supports
features such as character classes [ ] , metacharacters ( * , + , and

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 ? ), and capturing groups ( ( ) ). The re module also has a unique ADVERTISEMENT

raw string syntax ( r' ' ) to simplify working with backslashes.

It's important to be aware of the flavor of regular expressions you are using
when working with regular expressions in different programming languages
or tools. This ensures that you use the correct syntax and take advantage of
any unique features or capabilities provided by that particular flavor.

N.B.: Don’t bother so much about the metacharacters (and quantifiers)

mentioned in this part. You will see them in action in chapter 5 of this book.

Tools for Working with Regular Expressions

Regular expression tools are the programming languages, libraries and
frameworks, command line utilities, online regex testers, text editors and
IDEs, and applications designed to help you create, test, and apply regular
expressions in your day-to-day work life.

There are many tools available for working with regular expressions. Let me
take you through them under regex testers, programming languages,
libraries, text editors and IDEs, and command line tools.

RegEx Testers

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 RegEx testers are the online testing environments specifically built for
creating and testing regular expressions against some test strings.
Examples include regex101.com, regexr.com, and regexpal.com.

The UIs of these regex testers usually have an input for the regular
expressions you want to write, and another for the text you want to test the
regex against.

This is how the UI of regexpal.com looks:

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 More advanced ones like regex101.com let you select the flavor of regular
expressions you want to work with, an explanation of the regex, and match
information.

Here’s what the UI of regex101.com looks like:

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One of the good things about these online regex testers is that they are
helpful for learning regular expressions. A lot of them provide real-time

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 matching and cheatsheets you can quickly look at. Many devs who use
regex have used them.

Apart from learning, you can also use them by creating your regex with
them and pasting them into wherever you want to use the regex. This is
how I create my regex.

Programming Languages
Almost all modern programming languages have built-in support for regular
expressions. And so they all have methods for creating and testing regular
expressions.

For example, JavaScript has the RegExp() constructor for working with
regular expressions, Python has the re module, Java has the
java.util.regex package, and Perl has regex built into it directly.

Libraries and Frameworks

Many programming languages have standalone libraries and frameworks
that make it easier to create regular expressions.

There is XRegExp for JavaScript, PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular

Expressions) for Perl, Go-Restructure for Golang, and Verbal Expressions, a
cross-platform regex library.
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 Text Editors and IDEs
Many text editors and IDEs such as VS Code, Visual Studio, Notpad++,
Atom, Sublime Text, IntelliJ IDEA, and others have built-in support for
regular expressions.

The commonest thing developers use this for is search, and search and
replace. Also, the syntax highlighting in those text editors and IDEs is often
implemented with regular expressions.

Command Line Tools

Unix command line tools like grep and sed allow you to perform regex
operations on text files and streams. With this, you can search, filter, and
manipulate multiple files.

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Using these Unix tools, options for customizing search behaviors and
customizing complex text transformations are also available to you.

Basic Concepts of Regular Expressions

The basic concepts and syntax of regular expressions are the building
blocks involved in creating, testing, and applying patterns for searching,
matching, and manipulating strings.

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 This includes concepts like literal characters, metacharacters, quantifiers,
character classes, anchors and boundaries, and escape characters. The
more advanced ones are groupings, backreferences, look-ahead
assertions, and look-behind assertions.

Regular expressions users utilize many of these concepts to construct

efficient regular expressions for working with text. On many occasions, the
basic ones are enough. But if you want to create more advanced regular
expressions, then the more advanced ones will also be useful for you.

This book won’t leave any of the concepts behind. I will show you how you
can utilize them in regex testers and how you can use them in JavaScript
since that’s what this book is meant for.

Chapter 2: How to Match Literal Characters

and Character Sets in Regular Expressions
What are Literal Characters in Regular Expressions?
Literal characters are characters you can match as they appear in a test
string. They could be letters, numbers, spaces, or even symbols. In other
words, they are non-special characters that represent themselves.

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 This means if you want to match literal characters, you should construct
your regex pattern in the same way as the test string appears.

For example, if you want to match the word hello , your regex pattern can
be hello . And if you want to match the h in the word hatch , all you need
as the pattern is h .

This h would match the first occurrence of the letter h in the test string
hatch . If you want it to match the other letter h as well, you need the "g"
flag, or global flag. You will learn about the flags and modifiers in the next
chapter of this book.

That is not the case for some symbols, though. That’s because some
symbols are special characters of regular expressions (metacharacters and
quantifiers). So, if you want to match those characters, you have to escape
them with a backslash ( \ ). This book will also teach you all you need to
know about metacharacters because there's a whole chapter for them.

How to Match Literal Characters in RegEx Testers

Provided you want to match the word hello , then hello should be your
regex pattern:

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 If you want to match the text freeCodeCamp , you can construct your regex
to be freeCodeCamp :

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 So, what if you want to match hello freeCodeCamp ? Then you just use
hello freeCodeCamp as the pattern:

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If you want to match the letter e in the text freeCodeCamp , e is the pattern
to use:

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 And if you want to match h in the text hatch , h is the pattern you should
use:

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You can see that in the text freeCodeCamp , the other e s after the first
occurrence were not returned as matches – same with the last h in the
word hatch . You will learn how to match every occurrence of a letter in a
text in the next chapter.

Character Set Matching

A character set, also called character class, is a set of characters that will
successfully match a certain character in a test string. This set of characters
is enclosed in square brackets.

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 For instance, the pattern [abc] will match any of a , b , and c , while [xyz]
will match any of x , y , and z .

Here are some examples of character sets and what they do:

[abc] : matches either a , b , or c

[aeiou] : matches any vowel character

[a-z] : matches any lowercase letter from a to z

[A-Z] : matches any uppercase letter from A to Z

[0-9] : matches any digit from 0 to 9

Inside the square brackets, you don’t need to escape metacharacters

because they lose their special meaning. The only symbol that has a
meaning in the square brackets is a hyphen ( - ), which you can use to
specify ranges, as I have done with some examples of character sets.

You will also learn about ranges in this book. On some occasions, a
backslash \ does not lose its special meaning in a character set.

As with literal character matching, only the first occurrence of the

character set will return as a match, every other occurrence will be ignored.

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 In the next chapter, you will learn how to match multiple occurrences of a
character with the g flag.

Here’s how each of the above character sets works in a regex testing tool:

[abc] :

[aeiou] :

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 [a-z] :

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 [A-Z] :

[0-9] :

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 You can also define your unique character class based on what you want.
Character sets are useful when you want to match some characters in a
particular position in a text. ADVERTISEMENT

For instance, the pattern br[ao]ke will match both brake and broke :

The pattern gr[ae]y will match both gray and grey :

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 N.B.: I turned on the g flag so you can see all the matches, and how
powerful character sets are. We will take a look at the g and other flags in
the next chapter.

Since there are always multiple ways of doing the same thing in
programming, there are also certain character sets called "shorthand
character sets" that you can use instead of character sets.

Since these shorthand character sets are a subset of metacharacters, you

will learn about them under the chapter dedicated to metacharacters.

Chapter 3: Regular Expressions Flags

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 Also called modifiers, flags are special characters you can place at the end
or within a regular expressions pattern to alter its default behavior.

JavaScript developers tend to refer to these characters as "flags", but in

Python they are used interchangeably.

In Python, you can place flags within a regex pattern, but in JavaScript, flags
are always placed at the end of the regex pattern.

Here are the flags you can use in regular expressions:

global flag ADVERTISEMENT

case insensitive flag

multi-line flag

single-line flag

unicode flag

sticky flag

In many regex engines, you can turn on any flag you want to use. In
regex101.com, you can turn on a flag by clicking on the slash symbol ( / )
right inside the pattern input:

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 You can then select any flag you want to use:

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 N.B.: If the flavor of regex you selected in regex101.com is not ECMAScript, ADVERTISEMENT

the set of flags presented to you might be different.

If you are using regexpal.com, click on "flags" above the regex pattern input:

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 Select any flag you want by clicking on it:

Now, let's take a detailed look at each of the regex flags and how they work
in a regex engine.

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 The global Flag
The global flag is denoted by the letter g . With it, you get to perform a
global match with your pattern.

Remember in the previous chapter of this book, some patterns I defined

stopped when they found the first match, even if there were more. That’s
because by default, regular expressions only find the first match in a text.
But with the g flag, all occurrences of the match are returned.

Another good thing about using the g flag is that you can iterate over the
matches you get with the pattern in JavaScript. The iteration continues
until there’s nothing to match. You will learn about multiple ways you can
iterate over matches soon.

To let you see how the g flag works, I’ll use the hatch and freeCodeCamp
examples from the previous chapter.

If you want to match the letters h in the word hatch with the pattern h ,
both the first and the last h s will be returned as matches as long as you
have the g flag on:

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And if you want to match e in freeCodeCamp with the pattern e and you
turn on the g flag, the second and third e s are returned as a match too:

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 The case-insensitive Flag
The case insensitive flag is denoted by i . As the name implies, it lets you
perform case-insensitive matching.

By default, regular expressions perform case-sensitive matching. But with

the i flag you can perform case-insensitive matching, so you won’t bother
about casing in your patterns.

With this, uppercase or lowercase will be ignored. That means Hello and
hello will be treated as the same thing:

freeCodeCamp and freecodecamp are treated the same, too:

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 ADVERTISEMENT

RegEx and regex are also the same thing:

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 Another thing is that if you’re using a character class, for example [a-z] , it
would match uppercase letters too if you turn on the case-insensitive
flag.

So, the pattern [a-z] also matches uppercase letters with the case-
insensitive flag turned on:

The multi-line and single-line Flags

Denoted by m , the multi-line flag tells the regular expressions engine
that the test string is more than one line. Since the multi-line flag
influences the behavior of the start and end anchor metacharacters ( ^ and

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 $ ), you’ll learn more about it under the anchors and word boundaries
chapter.

The single-line flag is denoted by s . Just like the multi-line flag, the
single-line flag also works with a metacharacter called the wildcard ( . ).
You will see the single-line flag in action under the chapter for
metacharacters.

The Unicode Flag

The Unicode flag enables full Unicode matching in the regular expressions
engine that supports it. It is denoted by u .

By default, JavaScript and many other programming languages treat strings

as a sequence of 16-bit code units. With the u flag, regex patterns can
match against Unicode code points instead of code units. This allows
handling characters like emojis, certain symbols, and characters from non-
Latin scripts. So, when you set the flag, it modifies the behavior of certain ADVERTISEMENT

escape sequences and metacharacters to work with regular expressions.

For example, the escape sequence \u{1F602} will match the literal
character u{1F602} if you don’t turn on the u flag:

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 But if you turn on the u flag, the same pattern matches the face with tears
emoji:

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 That is one way to match emojis and other Unicode characters. Take the
Unicode of the emoji and put the hexadecimal in curly braces, then precede
the two with \u .

For instance, the Unicode of growing heart is U+1F497 , the pattern to match
it would be \u{1F497} :

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You will see more examples of how the flag works in the chapter on how to
use regular expressions in JavaScript.

The sticky Flag

The sticky flag is denoted by y . It’s a feature of JavaScript regular
expressions implemented in ECMAScript 6. The y flag limits matching to
the current position in the string, which you can specify with the lastIndex
property of the RegExp() constructor.

When you use the y flag, it uses the lastIndex property to determine
where the next search will start. The pattern matches only if it occurs
exactly at the lastIndex position or at the beginning of the string.

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 Unlike the global ( g ) flag, the y flag does not find all matches but stops
after the first successful match.

In a regex engine like regex101.com, the y flag usually anchors to the start
of the test string and stops there:

Since the y flag typically works with the lastIndex property of JavaScript
regular expressions, we will look at more examples in the chapter on how to
use regular expressions in JavaScript – specifically when we look at the
sticky of the regular expressions constructor.

You can also combine multiple flags to write more complex syntax. For
example, you can use the g flag with the i flag for global and case-
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