I have been working on admitting my weaknesses lately. And one of them is I really, really suck at writing regular expressions. I don’t think I have ever ginned anything more complicated than a “make sure this is three digits” expression from scratch. And I even forgot how to write that expression as I was writing this post.
Fortunately, there are smart people in this world who can help me out in my struggles. One of them is Roy Osherove, a longtime contributor to the .NET community. Many moons ago he wrote The Regulator, a handy regular expression generattion IDE.
But The Regulator still required someone know a bit about regular expression syntax and logic, which is a problem for many. So Roy came up with Regulazy–a first-ever point and click regular expression generation tool. It is still in alpha, but looks to be very promising in helping the regex challenged amongst us generate the necessary expressions. You can download it directly from the Regulazy site.
July 11th, 2006 at 7:01 am
Would this work for PHP Regular expressions?
July 11th, 2006 at 10:31 am
Err, KDE has KRegExpEditor, which is a very capable point-and-click interface. So not the first, and it’s not even in alpha!
July 11th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
I personally love writing regular expressions… It’s one of the joys of programming in my experience. Hehe…
I’ve found this resource to be especially helpful:
http://regularexpressions.info/
And of course, what I believe to be the best book on regular expressions out there. It really explained what’s happening “under the hood” and gives you a greater appreciation and respect for regex.
http://regex.info/
July 12th, 2006 at 5:10 am
@jamslam : you sick puppy
@klassicd : php and .net use perl’s regular expression engine from what I understand? Should work fine
Another great resource on the web is the online regular expression tester and library, regexlib.com
Hope that helps, (try to) have fun!