Is there a regular expression to detect a valid regular expression?
Is there a regular expression to detect a valid regular expression? This is a recursive regex, and is not supported by many regex engines. PCRE based ones should support it.
/ ^ # start of string ( # first group start (?: (?:[^?+*{}()[\]\\|]+ # literals and ^, $ | \\. # escaped characters | \[ (?: \^?\\. | \^[^\\] | [^\\^] ) # character classes (?: [^\]\\]+ | \\. )* \] | \( (?:\?[:=!]|\?<[=!]|\?>)? (?1)?? \) # parenthesis, with recursive content | \(\? (?:R|[+-]?\d+) \) # recursive matching ) (?: (?:[?+*]|\{\d+(?:,\d*)?\}) [?+]? )? # quantifiers | \| # alternative )* # repeat content ) # end first group $ # end of string / Without whitespace and comments