Regular Expression Workbench

The Regular Expression Workbench application was developed to be a small tool that will lets you experiment with .NET regular expressions.

Regular expressions are a really powerful facility, but they're a bit tough to learn. I've written this workbench to make it easier to create and understand regular expressions.

Using a regular expression To learn how to use the workbench, it's useful to use a sample regular expression. The following example can be used to match telephone numbers. For a number such as:

555-1212

The following regular expression can be used:

(?\d\d\d-\d\d\d\d)

Type the regex into the Regex editbox, and then type the phone number into the Strings editbox. Press Execute to try to match the regular expression against the string. The results of the match will apear in the output window. Hover over the regular expression to see what the various parts of the regular expression mean.