Regex explain
Paste a regular expression and read it back as plain English, token by token.
Anchored at both ends, so the entire subject has to match. No capturing groups. Flags: ignores case.
- Inside a character class "." is just a full stop — "[.]" matches a dot, not any character. Outside a class it still means anything.
Read top to bottom — each line consumes the next slice of the subject. Indentation is nesting: everything indented under a group belongs inside it, and a lookaround consumes nothing, it only checks.
Inheriting a long pattern full of lookaheads and non-capturing groups is a genuine reading problem. The pattern is correct or it is not, and you cannot tell which without decoding it piece by piece.
Each token is broken out and described in order — what it matches, how it repeats, whether it captures — so a wall of punctuation becomes a list of statements you can check against what the pattern is supposed to do.
What people open it for
- Understanding a regex you did not write before changing it
- Checking whether a pattern anchors and repeats as intended
- Learning what an unfamiliar construct does
In the terminal
tools regexplain
Every utility is also a command in the desktop's shell.