/blog/ · field notes from the hunt

Regex guides on the Regex Hunter Blog

Regex guides from the Regex Hunter blog: anchors, character classes, groups, lookarounds and flags explained step by step, with live examples to try.

Search articles

Sort

Showing 7–8 of 8 posts · 16 total

/(.)\1/

booklettercoffee·catdoglemon

Guides

Regex backreferences: patterns that remember what they matched

A backreference like \1 matches the exact text a group already captured. Here's how they work, how to find doubled letters, repeated words and palindromes, and the one place they don't work.

Regex Hunter9 Oct 2026

/q(?!u)/

iraqqatarqi·queenquietquote

Guides

Regex lookahead and lookbehind, explained with live boards

Lookarounds let a regex check what comes before or after a spot without matching it. Here's how all four work, where they shine, and when a plain pattern is shorter.

Regex Hunter8 Oct 2026

Today’s board is live

Read the trick. Now go hunt.

Match every monster, spare every innocent — in as few characters as you can.

Play today’s Daily Try Spree