Regular Expressions

Scryfall Regex Flavor

Scryfall supports most POSIX regular expression constructs, many are detailed below. Our regular expressions have the following configuration and limits:

• If your expression includes forward slashes / they must be escaped: \\/
• Scryfall regular expressions are Unicode-aware. The . will match characters beyond the ASCII range.
• Backreferences are not supported (\\1, \\2, etc).
• All regular expressions are case-insensitive (i).
• All regular expressions are “multiline” mode (m). Line anchors will match paragraphs in Oracle text, instead of the entire block.
• All characters in your expression are significant and whitespace will be matched (sometimes listed as “tight mode”).
• You cannot add configuration to regular expressions on Scryfall. For example o:/tap/ will work while o:/tap/gi will not.
• Scryfall regular expressions are match-only. Scryfall does not support extracting data from capture groups or performing substitutions.
• Scryfall uses only the \n character for newlines in all text fields across our entire database. No fields include \r or \f.
• The Scryfall database does not include bells (\a), null-bytes (\0), or other esoteric control characters.

Scryfall Extensions

Scryfall includes the following additional, non-standard regex features:

Syntax	Feature
~	An automatic alias for the current card name or “this spell” if the card mentions itself
\\sm	Short-hand escape for any mana symbol
\\ss	Short-hand escape for any card symbol
\\spt	Short-hand escape for a X/X power/toughness expression
\\spp	Short-hand escape for a +X/+X power/toughness expression
\\smm	Short-hand escape for a -X/-X power/toughness expression

Atoms

The following atoms are supported:

Atom	Description
.	Any single character
[kf]	Bracket expression matching a single character which is k or f (or any other group of literal characters)
[^kf]	Bracket expression matching a single character which is not k or f (or any other group of literal characters)
[f-k]	Bracket expression matching a single character which is between f through k in Unicode, inclusive (or any other range of of literal characters)
(re)	A group that matches the expression re
(re|fe)	A group that matches either the expression re or fe. | is the pipe character
\\k	A literal escaped k (or any other character)
k	The character k (or another non-meta character)

Quantifiers

The following quantifiers are supported:

Quantifier	Description
*	A sequence of 0 or more matches of the atom
+	A sequence of 1 or more matches of the atom
?	A sequence of 0 or 1 matches of the atom
{M}	A sequence of exactly M matches of the atom, where M is a number
{M,}	A sequence of M or more matches of the atom
{M,N}	A sequence of M through N (inclusive) matches of the atom; M cannot exceed N
*?	Non-greedy version of *
+?	Non-greedy version of +
??	Non-greedy version of ?
{M}?	Non-greedy version of {M}
{M,}?	Non-greedy version of {M,}
{M,N}?	Non-greedy version of {M,N}

Anchors and Lookarounds

The following anchors/lookarounds are supported:

Anchor	Description
^	Matches at the beginning of a line or the beginning of the field
$	Matches at the end of a line or the end of the field
\\b	Matches the boundary of a word
(?=re)	Positive lookahead: matches at any point where a substring matching re begins
(?!re)	Negative lookahead: matches at any point where no substring matching re begins
(?<=re)	Positive lookbehind: matches at any point where a substring matching re ends
(?<!re)	Negative lookbehind: matches at any point where no substring matching re ends

Character Classes

The following character classes are supported:

Class	Description
\\n	Matches a newline
\\s	Matches any whitespace
\\d	Matches a single digit character: 0-9
\\w	Matches any word character: A through z and 0 through 9
\\uHHHH	Matches a character whose hexadecimal value is HHHH, where HHHH is exactly four hexadecimal digits