CERegEx

A Cheat Engine plugin for scanning process memory with regular expressions.

Features

• Scan selected memory regions using Cheat-Engine-like protection flags RWXC
• Multiple regex engines supported
• Return match addresses and matched text back to Lua
• Configuration:
  • encoding
  • regex engine
  • case sensitivity
  • minimum / maximum extracted string length
  • find-one mode

Build Requirements

• Windows
• VS2026 with C++ desktop development tools
• vcpkg

Dependency Layout

• lua 5.3 (provided)
• CE SDK v5.0.0 (provided)

vcpkg dependencies

• re2
• pcre2

Building

1. Install and integrate vcpkg

If you do not already have vcpkg integrated with Visual Studio: vcpkg integrate install

2. Restore dependencies

From the solution directory, run: vcpkg install

4. Build the project

• Release | x64

Setup

1. Copy the compiled DLL to Cheat Engine\plugins
2. Open Cheat Engine
3. Go to Edit -> Settings -> Plugins
4. Add new the plugin DLL
5. Check the added plugin and hit OK

Lua API

The plugin exposes a Lua entrypoint for regex-based memory scanning.

Function

lregexScan( { pattern, protectionFlags, encoding, regexEngine, findOne, caseSensitive, minLength, maxLength } )

Parameters

A dictionary table with the following fields (all optional except for pattern):

• pattern
  • Regex pattern string
• protection
  • Cheat Engine-style protection filter string
• encoding
  • String extraction encoding, such as "ASCII" or "UTF16"
• engine
  • Regex engine name, such as "STD", "RE2", or "PCRE2"
• findOne
  • Boolean flag that stops after the first match if enabled
• caseSensitive
  • Boolean flag for case-sensitive matching
• minLength
  • Minimum extracted candidate string length
• maxLength
  • Maximum extracted candidate string length

On success, it returns a table with dictionaries of two fields:

• address
  • Integer pointing to the start of the matched string in the target
• text
  • String containing a matched string

Returns nil on any failure or if no matches

Example

return lregexScan({
    pattern = [[Godot\sEngine\s]],
    protection = "WR-E-C",
    encoding = "ASCII",
    engine = "RE2",
    findOne = true,
    caseSensitive = true,
    minLength = 8,
    maxLength = 20
}) or {}

Supported Encodings

Currently supported:

• ASCII
• UTF-16LE BMP

Supported Regex Engines

• STD uses std::regex
• RE2
  • Faster and safer
  • Does not support the full PCRE-style feature set
  • Good for portable and simpler patterns
• PCRE2
  • Supports more advanced syntax
  • Suitable for patterns using features such as lookaheads

Engine-specific syntax is allowed when that engine is selected

License

This project is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.