A regular expression - short regex - is a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern. Regexes are commonly used to search for and manipulate text. For example, you can search for all the occurrences of a particular word in a document, or replace all the occurrences of a certain character with another character. The ability to search for patterns in text, rather than just fixed strings of characters, makes regex very useful for a wide variety of tasks, such as data validation and text processing.
Regex 101
Regex 101 is a free and very comprehensive website that provides a great variety of tools that allow you to test, debug, and optimize your regular expressions in your browser. Helpful features, such as real-time highlighting, detailed explanations of how your Regular Expressions work, and support for multiple programming languages make it useful for anyone who just starting to learn it or is already an experienced user. Additionally, Regex101 has a large library of user submitted expressions, so in many cases you do not even have to write the expressions from scratch yourself.
Link: https://regex101.com/
YouCode AI: Regex
The Regex App of the search engine You.com is incredible and I don’t know if there is anything else like it currently. Using AI, it allows you to input anything you’d like the expression to do, and - voilá - You.com’s Regex AI will create that expression for you instantly. It is mind-blowing and very exciting for me seeing more and more applications of AI easily accessible for general use. You.com’s Regex app not only saves you a lot of time and energy when creating regular expressions but is also just fun to play around with. I also enjoy the accessibility since all you have to do is search for regex within the search engine and type in your desired expression. This tool is primarily made for creating expressions - if you want to validate them or get more information you will have to use the different tools presented here.
Link: https://you.com/search?q=regex
Regexr
I find this site really great for learning regex or trying to understand more complex regular expressions. After typing in your expression, Regexr provides you with very detailed explanations of those expressions. It also has real-time highlighting to show you exactly how the regex matches the text and you can test your regular expressions on sample text. The cheatsheet helps with refreshing your knowledge about characters, groups, or quantifiers. Similar to Regex 101, there are also some community patterns and you also have the option to save your own patterns.
Link: https://regexr.com/
Conclusion
There are some incredible tools put there to help you understand and work with regex better and faster. Consider checking them out and let me know what you think about them in the comments! And if you have more suggestions, of course also make sure to let me know so I can include them in future articles!