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Regular expressions preview

Applies to: SQL Server 2025 (17.x) Preview Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Managed Instance SQL database in Microsoft Fabric

This article introduces regular expressions for SQL Server.

Note

As a preview feature, the technology presented in this article is subject to Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.

A regular expression, or regex, is a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern for text. Regex is commonly used for a variety of tasks including pattern matching, data validation, data transformation, and querying. It offers a flexible and an efficient way to search, manipulate, and handle complex data operations.

Note

Regular expressions are available in Azure SQL Managed Instance configured with the Always-up-to-date update policy.

This implementation of regular expression is based on the RE2 regular expression library. For more information, visit RE2 Regular Expression Syntax.

For example:

Function Description
REGEXP_LIKE Returns a Boolean value that indicates whether the text input matches the regex pattern.
REGEXP_REPLACE Returns a modified source string replaced by a replacement string, where occurrence of the regex pattern found.
REGEXP_SUBSTR Extracts parts of a string based on a regular expression pattern.

Returns Nth occurrence of a substring that matches the regex pattern.
REGEXP_INSTR Returns the starting or ending position of the matched substring, depending on the option supplied.
REGEXP_COUNT Returns a count of the number of times that regex pattern occurs in a string.
REGEXP_MATCHES Returns a table of captured substring(s) that match a regular expression pattern to a string. If no match is found, the function returns no row.
REGEXP_SPLIT_TO_TABLE Returns a table of strings split, delimited by the regex pattern. If there's no match to the pattern, the function returns the string.

Regular expressions can be composed of literal characters and meta-characters, which have special meanings and functions.

A simple regular expression is a single literal character. Characters match themselves, except for the meta-characters. Meta-characters include *, +, ?, (, ), or |. To match a meta-character, escape it with a backslash. For example, \* matches the literal asterisk (*) character.

Accepted regular expression characters

Single character expressions

Kinds of single-character expressions Examples
any character, possibly including newline (s=true) .
character class [xyz]
negated character class [^xyz]
Perl character classes \d
negated Perl character class \D
ASCII character classes [[:alpha:]]
negated ASCII character class [[:^alpha:]]
Unicode character class (one-letter name) \pN
Unicode character class \p{Greek}
negated Unicode character class (one-letter name) \PN
negated Unicode character class \P{Greek}

Perl character classes

The following table lists currently supported Perl character classes.

Perl character classes (all ASCII-only) Description
\d digits ( [0-9])
\D not digits ( [^0-9])
\s whitespace ( [\t\n\f\r ])
\S not whitespace ( [^\t\n\f\r ])
\w word characters ( [0-9A-Za-z_])
\W not word characters ( [^0-9A-Za-z_])

ASCII character classes

The following table lists currently supported ASCII character classes.

ASCII character classes Description
[[:alnum:]] alphanumeric ( [0-9A-Za-z])
[[:alpha:]] alphabetic ( [A-Za-z])
[[:ascii:]] ASCII ( [\x00-\x7F])
[[:blank:]] blank ( [\t ])
[[:cntrl:]] control ( [\x00-\x1F\x7F])
[[:digit:]] digits ( [0-9])
[[:graph:]] graphical ( [!-~] or [A-Za-z0-9!"#$%&'()*+,\-./:;<=>?@[\\\]^_`{|}~])
[[:lower:]] lower case ( [a-z])
[[:print:]] printable ( [ -~] or [ [:graph:]])
[[:punct:]] punctuation ( [!-/:-@[-\``{-~])
[[:space:]] whitespace ( [\t\n\v\f\r ])
[[:upper:]] upper case ( [A-Z])
[[:word:]] word characters ( [0-9A-Za-z_])
[[:xdigit:]] hex digit ( [0-9A-Fa-f])

Literal characters

  • Letters
  • Numbers
  • Symbols

Metacharacters

  • * matches zero or more occurrences of the preceding character
  • ^ matches the beginning of a line

Groupings

Group and capture parts of the pattern with:

  • Parentheses ( )
  • Brackets [ ]
  • Braces { }

Flags

Use flags to modify the expression behavior. For example:

  • i
  • m
  • s
  • c

This implementation supports the POSIX standard of regular expressions following RE2, and has support for the PCRE/PCRE2 flavor of regular expressions syntax, which is compatible with most modern regular expression engines and tools. There are different flavors of regular expressions, such as POSIX, ANSI, Perl, and PCRE, which have different syntax and features.

Requirements

  • A SQL client tool, such as Azure Data Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, or Visual Studio Code.
  • A basic knowledge of SQL syntax and queries.
  • A basic understanding of regular expression syntax and concepts.

FAQ

What is the performance impact of using regex?

Regex queries can have a performance impact depending on the complexity of the regex pattern, the size of the text data, and the number of rows involved. You can use the execution plan and statistics to monitor and optimize the performance of your regex queries.

Known Issues, behaviors, and limitations

These are the items that aren't currently supported in this preview:

  • LOB data types (varchar(max) or nvarchar(max)) for string_expressions
  • Regular expression functions aren't supported on memory-optimized OLTP tables

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