Matching an IP address is another good example of a trade-off between regex complexity and exactness. \b\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\b will match any IP address just fine. But will also match 999.999.999.999 as if it were a valid IP address. If your regex flavor supports Unicode, it may even match ١٢٣.१२३.೧೨೩.๑๒๓. Whether this is a problem depends on the files or data you intend to apply the regex to.

Restricting and Capturing The Four IP Address Numbers

To restrict all 4 numbers in the IP address to 0..255, you can use the following regex. It stores each of the 4 numbers of the IP address into a capturing group. You can use these groups to further process the IP number. Free-spacing mode allows this to fit the width of the page.

\b(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\b

The above regex allows one leading zero for numbers 10 to 99 and up to two leading zeros for numbers 0 to 9. Strictly speaking, IP addresses with leading zeros imply octal notation. So you may want to disallow leading zeros. This requires a slightly longer regex:

\b(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9])\b

Restricting The Four IP Address Numbers Without Capturing Them

If you don’t need access to the individual numbers, you can shorten above 3 regexes with a quantifier to:

\b(?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}\b

\b(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\b

\b(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9])\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9])\b

Checking User Input

The above regexes use word boundaries to make sure the first and last number in the IP address aren’t part of a longer sequence of alphanumeric characters. These regexes are appropriate for finding IP addresses in longer strings.

If you want to validate user input by making sure a string consists of nothing but an IP address then you need to replace the word boundaries with start-of-string and end-of-string anchors. You can use the dedicated anchors \A and \z if your regex flavor supports them:

\A(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\z

If not, you’ll have to use ^ and $ and make sure that the option for them to match at line breaks is off:

^(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)$