Regex Cheat Sheet: The 20 Patterns You’ll Use Every Week

## The Regex You Actually Need

These 20 patterns cover 90% of real-world use cases.

## Validation Patterns

“`
Email: ^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$
URL: https?://(www.)?[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%._+~#=]{2,256}.[a-z]{2,6}
IP Address: ^(d{1,3}.){3}d{1,3}$
Phone (US): ^+?1?s?(?d{3})?[s.-]?d{3}[s.-]?d{4}$
Zip Code: ^d{5}(-d{4})?$
“`

## Text Matching

“`
Whole word: bwordb
Empty lines: ^s*$
Repeated word: b(w+)s+1b
“`

## Code & Data

“`
HTML tags: <[^>]+>
CSS hex color: #([A-Fa-f0-9]{6}|[A-Fa-f0-9]{3})b
JSON key: “([^”]+)”s*:
“`

## Date Patterns

“`
YYYY-MM-DD: ^d{4}-(0[1-9]|1[0-2])-(0[1-9]|[12]d|3[01])$
Time HH:MM: ^([01]d|2[0-3]):([0-5]d)$
“`

**Tip:** Use the Regex Tester to try all of these with your own input.