PHP Regex Cheat Sheet

Special Sequences

  • \w - Any “word” character (a-z 0-9 _)
  • \W - Any non “word” character
  • \s - Whitespace (space, tab CRLF)
  • \S - Any non whitepsace character
  • \d - Digits (0-9)
  • \D - Any non digit character
  • . - (Period) – Any character except newline

Meta Characters

  • ^ - Start of subject (or line in multiline mode)
  • $ - End of subject (or line in multiline mode)
  • [ - Start character class definition
  • ] - End character class definition
  • | - Alternates, eg (a|b) matches a or b
  • ( - Start subpattern
  • ) - End subpattern
  • \ - Escape character

Quantifiers

  • n* - Zero or more of n
  • n+ - One or more of n
  • n ? - Zero or one occurrences of n
  • {n} - n occurrences exactly
  • {n,} - At least n occurrences
  • {,m} - At most m occurrences
  • {n,m} - Between n and m occurrences (inclusive)

Pattern Modifiers

  • i - Case Insensitive
  • m - Multiline mode - ^ and $ match start and end of lines
  • s - Dotall - . class includes newline
  • x - Extended– comments and whitespace
  • e - preg_replace only – enables evaluation of replacement as PHP code
  • S - Extra analysis of pattern
  • U - Pattern is ungreedy
  • u - Pattern is treated as UTF-8

Point based assertions

  • \b - Word boundary
  • \B - Not a word boundary
  • \A - Start of subject
  • \Z - End of subject or newline at end
  • \z - End of subject
  • \G - First matching position in subject

Assertions

  • (?=) - Positive look ahead assertion foo(?=bar) matches foo when followed by bar
  • (?!) - Negative look ahead assertion foo(?!bar) matches foo when not followed by bar
  • (?<=) - Positive look behind assertion (?<=foo)bar matches bar when preceded by foo
  • (? - Negative look behind assertion (?
  • (?>) - Once-only subpatterns (?>\d+)bar Performance enhancing when bar not present
  • (?(x)) - Conditional subpatterns
  • (?(3)foo|fu)bar - Matches foo if 3rd subpattern has matched, fu if not
  • (?#) - Comment (?# Pattern does x y or z)
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3 comments:

Senyahnoj

June 10, 2008 at 9:48 AM

Thanks for this cheatsheet - I will definitely visit this page again and again.

Just one thing - you need to escape your HTML in your example of a negative lookbehind assertion as it's reading part of the line as a comment!

biovamps

June 20, 2008 at 1:43 AM

Thanx for your comments..i'l try to improve the things

Muhammad Azeem

March 11, 2011 at 8:34 PM

This is a nice article..
Its very easy to understand ..
And this article is using to learn something about it..
php tutorial
Thanks a lot..!