Regular Expressions

A number of features in your Localize dashboard allow you to enter a Regular Expression or "regex", including:

Example Regular Expressions

The follow are examples of some common Regular Expressions that you might find in your content.

Item	Regular Expression	Examples
Date With Slashes	`\d{1,2}\/\d{1,2}\/\d{4}`	1/2/2020 12/15/1963
Date with Dashes and text-based 3-letter month	`\d{1,2}-[A-Z]{1}[a-z]{2}-\d{4}`	11-Jan-2014 5-Apr-1963
Date and time	`[a-z,A-Z]{3} \d{1,2}, \d{4} \d{1,2}:\d{2} [A,a,P,p][M,m]`	Aug 9, 2021 10:20 AM Sep 11, 1964 10:20 pm
Short time	`\d{1,2}:\d{2} [A,a,P,p][M,m]`	12:34 PM 5:14 am
Countdown Timer (HH:MM:SS)	`\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}`	12:42:22 01:18:33
Brand name or other specific word	Localize	Any phrase whose content contains the string literal "Localize" anywhere in it
Specific ID #s (e.g. US social security #)	`\d{3}:\d{2}:\d{3}`	111-22-333
Specific word: dog	`^dog$`	Any phrase whose content is exactly "dog"

Special Characters in Regular Expressions

Special Characters

Regular expressions use special characters (metacharacters) to denote which characters to match in the source content. You must be careful when adding words/phrases to this list so that they aren't interpreted differently than you expect them to be.

The special characters are:

backslash \
caret ^
dollar sign $
period or dot .
vertical bar or pipe symbol |
question mark ?
asterisk or star *
plus sign +
opening parenthesis (
closing parenthesis )
opening square bracket [
opening curly brace {

Escaping

Any special characters that can be used in regular expressions will need to be "escaped" if you want to match the literal character.

For example: If you want to exclude anything with .tif in the phrase, you would enter: \.tif

The backslash tells the parser to consider the "." as a literal character.
Without the backslash, the .tif would include any phrase that has at least one character before tif, e.g. any phrase with the word "identify", etc.