Plain-English Regex Explainer

About this tool

Breaks a pattern into its parts (characters, character sets, anchors, quantifiers, groups, lookarounds and backreferences) and explains each one in turn. The contents of a group are indented beneath it, so you can see what a quantifier on the group repeats, and alternatives separated by | are listed one under another. You can paste a bare pattern or a full /pattern/flags literal, in which case the flags are explained too. It's a starting point for reading unfamiliar regex, not a substitute for testing it.