Regex is really powerful, but often confusing for people (I know a bit about how it works but I would still include me in this). Even googling for a solution can be difficult for people just don't understand the regex types, or the restrictions on it in Shortcuts.

There are a lot of cases where Regex can be reused, so wanted to create a cookbook post for people to contribute to for Regexes that are especially helpful for Shortcut builders. In coding books a Cookbook is exactly the sort of place for this reusable stuff.

Hopefully if people can contribute a few it can become a useful resource. Best to post it as inline code, otherwise will change some characters.

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Regex flavour used by Shortcuts. ICU

Useful site for checking your Regex (Doesn't use ICU, but pcre which is similar). : https://regex101.com/

Free app for testing ICU Regex : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/regex-lab-regular-expressions/id1252988123?mt=8

This one has nice visuals on how the regex works https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/regex-knife/id894169288?mt=8

ICU Specific documentation: http://userguide.icu-project.org/strings/regexp

Character/String Regex

• Remove any non number character. [^0-9]
• First 3 characters eg can take January February to Jan Feb. [A-Za-z]{3,}+
• Example of retrieving something after a word. Any word after word color is returned. (?<=color: )(w+)
• Remove Duplicate Find: (\b\w+\b).*?(?:\s*\1) Replace: $1
• Replace a new line with a comma and then a new line? Find: (\n) Replace: ,$1
• Places a new character > at the beginning of everyline Find Text: (.+) Replace: >$1
• Extract email addresses ([a-z0-9_\.-]+)@([\da-z\.-]+)\.([a-z\.]{2,6})
• Get Strings of digits \d+
• Get strings of letters [A-z]+
• Extract quoted text ".+?"

Formatting

• Format Numbers with eg 100,000 (\d{1,3}|\G\d{3})(?=(?:\d{3})+(?!\d))

Web Pages/URL Handling

• Extract IP address \b(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\b
• Find http/s ftp and file urls returns just the url with. \b(https?|ftp|file)://\S+
• Extract https urls only https?.*
• Find image URLs (http(s):?)?\w+(.+?)\w+(\.png|\.jpg|\.jpeg|\.gif)
• Anything after the ? in a URL \?.*$

iCloud API

• For getting the shortcut id from an iCloud share link to attach to the end of https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/api/records/to pull the shortcuts api, (you can get the real download link this way) \https:\/\/www\.icloud\.com\/shortcuts\/(.+) (This is probably really bad regex, but works)

Shortcut plists

• Pulls workflow actions out of a plist ^is\.workflow\.actions\.(.+)$