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Ruby Academy · Lesson

Regex Literals

Pattern basics.

What Is a Regular Expression?

A regular expression (regex) is a pattern used to match text. In Ruby, regex is a first-class object of class Regexp.

You use regex to search, validate, and extract parts of strings.

  • Match a word, digit, or symbol
  • Validate emails, phone numbers
  • Extract pieces from messy text
pattern = /hello/
puts pattern.class
puts(pattern.match?('hello world'))

Regex Literals with Slashes

The most common way to write a regex in Ruby is between two forward slashes: /pattern/.

This is called a regex literal. Everything between the slashes is the pattern.

ruby = /ruby/
puts ruby.class
puts(ruby.match?('I love ruby'))
puts(ruby.match?('I love python'))

All lessons in this course

  1. Regex Literals
  2. Matching and Capturing
  3. Substitution
  4. Named Groups and Anchors
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