The present invention provides a multi-mode regular expression matching method and apparatus. The method comprises: filtering to-be-matched data according to a fist layer filter feature set to obtain data segments and targeted exact character strings upon the first layer filtering; searching for a corresponding regular expression superset according to the targeted exact character strings, and conducting second layer filtering on the data segments obtained via the first layer filtering to obtain data segments and a targeted regular expression superset upon the second layer filtering; determining a corresponding regular expression according to the targeted regular expression superset, and matching the data segments upon the second layer filtering by using the regular expression. According to the technical solutions provided by the present invention, the filtering rate and effect are improved via two layer filtering, thereby ensuring stability of the matching performance, and preventing passage of pure data.