The Regex Coach
by I just used this for the first time, and realized it's worth a post.
The Regex Coach is awesome. Oh man, if you ever have to write regular expressions for anything, this tool will make your job so much easier. It's basically a WYSIWYG editor utility for writing regexes.
Put in your regex up top, and your target string in the middle. Then you have controls at the bottom to scroll through matches, and even debug the pattern by seeing what each and every step does. So cool.
And it's free!
http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/
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8 Comments
I sometimes use a program called Expresso, wasn't bad, but haven't used it enough to fully give it a critique.
love/hate is right.
Oh man, a dream of mine is to make an interperter that takes regular condition structs (if else then, etc) and build regexp out of them. But I guess that beats the point of having regexp in the first place
I don't know if this is the same program, but I used to use something (command-line prog) that would generate regex. You were given choices like, "this exact string", "any char", "any number", "n times", "unlimited number", "followed by". It was pretty cool. great if you don't know regex syntax, or you forget it, or you block it out of your mind because it drives you crazy.
its close, expresso is GUI with the same concept
I've used something similar to this before. pretty sweet, I'll be needing this in the future. I hate/love regex.
DEFINITELY love/hate. so powerful and fast, yet so arcane and unreadable and tricky.
ian, your super cool formatting tags ain't working in article text.