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Regex patterns I actually reuse

A short reference of regular expressions that come up repeatedly in day-to-day scripting.

Regex

Common patterns

^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}$          # US phone number
^[\w.+-]+@[\w-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$   # basic email
^https?:\/\/[^\s]+$          # URL
\b\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}\b        # ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD)

Non-greedy matching

<.+?>                        # match the shortest tag content, not the longest

Named groups (Python)

import re
match = re.search(r"(?P<year>\d{4})-(?P<month>\d{2})", "2026-07")
match.group("year")  # "2026"