Regulazy—Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

By Wyatt Barnett | July 11, 2006 | .NET

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.

Written By:

Wyatt Barnett

Wyatt leads the in-house development team for a major industry trade association. When not slinging obscene amounts of C# and SQL at a few exceedingly large monitors, he is most often spotted staring at HDTV and other forms of entertainment in local watering holes.

{ 4 comments }

chris ward July 12, 2006 at 5:10 am: I personally love writing regular expressions… It’s one of the joys of programming in my experience. Hehe…
@jamslam : you sick puppy
Would this work for PHP Regular expressions?
@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!
jamslam July 11, 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/
jcurry July 11, 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!
klassicd July 11, 2006 at 7:01 am: Would this work for PHP Regular expressions?