A system and method for compiling and matching regular expressions is disclosed. The regular expression compiling system includes a syntax analyzing module and at least two types of compiling modules. The syntax analyzing module is configured to analyze syntactic characteristics of a regular expression and send the regular expression to an appropriate compiling module according to preset syntactic rules and the syntactic characteristics of the regular expression; and the appropriate compiling module is configured to receive the regular expression and compile the regular expression into a data structure of a specific form.