REGEXTEST Function

Applies To
Excel for Microsoft 365 Excel for Microsoft 365 for Mac

The REGEXTEST function allows you to check whether any part of supplied text matches a regular expression ("regex"). It will return TRUE if there is a match and FALSE if there is not.

Syntax

The REGEXTEST function determines whether any part of text matches the pattern.

The syntax of the REGEXTEST function is:

REGEXTEST(text, pattern, [case_sensitivity])

Argument Description
text
(required)		 The text or the reference to a cell containing the text you want to match against.
pattern
(required)		 The regular expression ("regex") that describes the pattern of text you want to match.
case_sensitivity Determines whether the match is case-sensitive. By default, the match is case-sensitive. Enter one of the following:
0: Case sensitive
1: Case insensitive

Note

When writing regex patterns, symbols called ‘tokens’ can be used that match with a variety of characters. These are some simple tokens for reference:

  • “[0-9]”: any numerical digit
  • “[a-z]”: a character in the range of a to z
  • “.”: any character
  • “a”: the “a” character
  • “a*”: zero or more “a”
  • “a+”: one or more “a”
  • All regular expressions for this function, as well as REGEXEXTRACT and REGEXREPLACE use the PCRE2 'flavor' of regex.
  • REGEXEXTRACT always return text values. You can convert these results back to a number with the VALUE function.

Examples

Copy the example data and paste it in cell A1 of a new Excel worksheet. If you need to, you can adjust the column widths to see all the data.

Example 1

Check various aspects of the string 'alfalfa'

Data
alfalfa
Formulas Questions
=REGEXTEST(A2,"a") Does it contain the letter 'a'?
=REGEXTEST(A2,"[a-z]") Does it contain any lower case letters?
=REGEXTEST(A2,"[A-Z]") Does it contain any upper case letters?
=REGEXTEST(A2,"[aeiou]") Does it contain any vowels?
=REGEXTEST(A2,"[0-9]") Does it contain any number digits?

The following illustration shows the results.

Using REGEXTEXT to answer various questions about the word alfalfa

Example 2

Check whether phone numbers have the specific format "(###) ###-####", using the pattern:

"^\([0-9]{3}\) [0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}$"

Note

Backslash "\" is used to 'escape' parentheses "()" and some other characters. In this pattern, "\(" is interpreted as "(" and "\)" is interpreted as ")"

Data
(378) 555-4195
+1(878) 555-8622
Formulas
=REGEXTEST(A2,"^\([0-9]{3}\) [0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}$")
=REGEXTEST(A2,"^\([0-9]{3}\) [0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}$")

The following illustration shows the result.

Using REGEXTEST to check whether phone numbers are in a specific syntax, with the pattern ^\([0-9]{3}\) [0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}$