How to Use Regular Expressions for Page Targeting and IP Blocking

A Regular Expression, REGEX, is a special text string for describing a search pattern. Within Hotjar, you can use Regular Expressions to target pages with Surveys, or to determine when Hotjar should start recording a user's session.

In addition, Regular Expressions can be used to prevent IP addresses from being tracked by Recordings and Heatmaps. The IP block configurations can be found in the How to block your own IP section of our How to Change Session Capture and Edit Site Settings article.

• REGEX for Page Targeting
• REGEX for IP Blocking
• Common Mistakes

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Page Targeting with Regular Expressions

For page targeting, when setting up your tool, there will be a Page Targeting option in which Regular Expressions can be set as the targeting option.

• Wildcard examples (where * can be anything)
• Wildcard excluding a certain pattern
• Excluding certain words or patterns in a URL
• Multiple pages which don't follow any pattern

Wildcard examples (where * can be anything)

Example:

Target: www.example.com/pages/*

Example: (http|https):\/\/www.example.com\/pages\/.*

 

Example:

Target: www.example.com/pages/*/article

Example: (http|https):\/\/www.example.com\/pages\/[^\/]+\/article

 

Example:

Target:www.example.com/user/<user_id>/profile/(numeric user_id)

Example: (http|https):\/\/www.example.com\/user\/[0-9]+\/profile\/

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Wildcard excluding a certain pattern

Example:

Target: All pages which match the pattern but do not include the word "article" or "post" www.example.com/pages/*/subpage

Example: (http|https):\/\/www.example.com\/pages\/(?!article|post)[^\/]+\/subpage

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Excluding certain words or patterns in a URL

Example: Target: Pages which include the word "page" and do not include "somepage":

Example: (?=.*page.*)(?!.*somepage).*
 

Please note that while this example uses lookahead, a feature of the PCRE2 flavor of regex, it will not work for our heatmaps and global filters, as they use the RE2 flavor as mentioned in our guide What Are Heatmap URL Filters.

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Multiple pages that don't follow any pattern

Example: Target these three pages:

• www.example.com/pages/article-one/details/
• www.example.com/pages/some-random-word/details/
• www.example.com/pages/another-post/details/

Example: (http|https):\/\/www.example.com\/pages\/(article-one|some-random-word|another-post)\/details\/

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Blocking IPs with Regular Expressions

• Simple IP match (single IP)
• IP Ranges
• CIDR notation IPs
• Different IPs

Simple IP match (single IP)

Example: Block the IP 192.168.0.1

Example: 192.168.0.1 or 192\.168\.0\.1

Both would work since in regex, the "." character means "any character".

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IP Ranges

Example: Block the IPs 192.168.0.14 - 192.168.0.62

Example: 192\.168\.0\.(1[4-9]|2[0-9]|3[0-9]|4[0-9]|5[0-9]|6[0-2]) 

Example: Block the IPs 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255

Example: 192\.168\.0\.\d{1,3}

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CIDR notation IPs

Example: 127.76.111.64/28

Example: 127\.76\.111\.(6[4-9]|7[0-9])

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Different IPs

Block all these IPs:

Example:

• 192.168.0.1
• 192.168.0.100
• 192.168.0.150

Example: 192\.168\.0\.(1|100|150)

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Watch out for common mistakes

• If you include the start and end characters (^ and $) then any URL that includes text before or after the pattern will not be matched. Avoid using them. It's very common for URLs to include query strings at the end, such as the UTM parameter that are added to URLs for tracking purposes. An example would be:
  https://www.hotjar.com/?utm_campaign=ads
• A forward-slash (/) at the end of the URL is generally optional. If your REGEX includes that character at the end, then a visit to the same URL but without the forward-slash wouldn't match. It is better not to include that final forward slash character.
• There is a limit of 750 characters for all of our REGEX targeting rules. If you go over this limit, an error message stating that There was a problem saving session targeting and tracking settings. Please retry later will alert you of this issue.

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