The New Interface Advocate

Everybody Loves Regular Expressions!

Tags: chart, cheatsheet, dvi, latex, pdf, png, postscript, quick reference, Reference, regex, regular expressions

I’ve had several requests for my “Regular Expressions Quick-Reference/Comparison Chart,” so I’m posting it here. At the moment, it covers the vim-, BRE- (used by ed, sed, and grep), ERE- (used by egrep, and sed -r), and perl- (used by perl (naturally!) and most copies of rename) flavors at the moment. This is still quite a work in progress—I’m considering adding another column (perhaps ruby?), and I’m sure there are at least one or two typos that I’ve let slip through. Please tell me if you find any errors at all, either through comment here or by email.

(The requisite preview thumbnail—click to see the 150dpi PNG version.)

After the jump, I’ve attached PDF, postscript, and closely-cropped PNG (150- and 300dpi) versions. I’ve also included my LaTeX source file. Enjoy!

This first release is out of date, last revised on 2008-04-23. See this post for the second version.

My “Regular Expressions Quick-Reference/Comparison Chart,” available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licence, comes in the following flavors:

• PDF: Regular Expressions Quick-Reference/Comparison Chart (PDF)
• Postscript: Regular Expressions Quick-Reference/Comparison Chart (Postscript)
• 150dpi PNG: Regular Expressions Quick-Reference/Comparison Chart (150dpi PNG)
• 300dpi PNG: Regular Expressions Quick-Reference/Comparison Chart (300dpi PNG)
• LaTeX source: Regular Expressions Quick-Reference/Comparison Chart (LaTeX source)

Currently known errors/omissions:

• From scrooloose (in #vim on irc.freenode.net): “vim has negative lookahead” and possibly other “look” operations. (Note: Check out :h \@! for more info.)

Revisions:

• 2008-04-23: First public release.
• 2009-08-07: Second public release, available at the post announcing the new revision.