Great Expectations 1.18.1 - Data Docs Regex Fix and Doc Cleanup
Great Expectations 1.18.1 is a patch release published on June 11, 2026. The change most teams will notice is a Data Docs bug fix: regex patterns that contain angle brackets were not HTML escaped, which could break or misrender validation reports. The rest of the release is documentation housekeeping and temporary CI test skips for BigQuery and Snowflake.
The full release notes and downloads are on the GitHub release page.
Data Docs regex rendering fix
Data Docs is how Great Expectations turns validation results into browsable HTML reports. When an expectation uses a regex pattern with angle bracket characters, those symbols have special meaning in HTML. If they are not escaped, the browser can treat part of the pattern as markup instead of plain text.
PR #11909 fixes that gap. Regex angle brackets in Data Docs output are now HTML escaped before render. Teams that validate string columns with patterns like email filters, XML snippets, or comparison operators in regex should see stable output after upgrading.
This is a rendering fix, not a change to how expectations evaluate data. Validation logic stays the same. Only the HTML report layer changes. If you export Data Docs to static files or serve them from S3, the fix applies there too. No config flag is required after upgrade.
Documentation updates
Two doc changes ship with 1.18.1 and both are worth a quick read if you maintain internal runbooks.
PR #11900 syncs the docs version label to the released 1.18.0 line. If you noticed a mismatch between the published package version and what the docs site claimed, this release aligns those labels.
PR #11906 removes the GX Cloud docs site from the documentation set. Operators who still had bookmarks or links to that site should update internal references. The open source project docs remain on the main Great Expectations documentation path.
Neither change alters runtime behavior. They reduce confusion for anyone pinning versions or following setup guides. The release is published from the Fivetran fork at fivetran/great_expectations, while the upstream repo remains at great-expectations/great_expectations. Both URLs point to the same project lineage.
CI maintenance: BigQuery and Snowflake tests skipped
The remaining items are maintenance only. PR #11908 temporarily skips BigQuery integration tests, and PR #11911 does the same for Snowflake integration tests.
These skips affect the project’s CI pipeline, not end user installs. If you run Great Expectations against BigQuery or Snowflake in production, your own test suites are unchanged. The temporary skips usually mean upstream credentials, quotas, or flaky remote dependencies blocked reliable CI runs. Watch follow up releases if you care about whether those connectors are actively tested in upstream CI again.