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WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

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Twinbee:
Especially if it interfaces with/generates RegEx.
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You bet! :) I've added an option so that it not just displays the Regex on the fly, but you can edit the Regex if you need more power than WildOpal would usually provide.

A nice feature is even editing the text to work on - it will highlight letters as you go along. So everything updates on the fly automatically whether you're typing in the search (regex, or WildOpal style), replacement text, or the main text that it searches on.

If it did, it could get some use especially if it could be invoked easily through e.g. Notepad++
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Well, for now, it's easy enough to select text and copy paste it straight into WildOpal, but yes that's worth considering.

rather than trying to re-invent a wheel that isn't a wheel and getting your head wrapped into a pretzel on meta design issues!
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Yes that road is littered with headaches, mines and nightmares. Implementing even a few basic features was proving to be more than a little tricky. Piggybacking off Regex is a breeze in comparison!

Anyway, it's coming along pretty well so far. Here are the buttons/symbols I've implemented so far and what they convert to:


* Single character: .
* Many characters: .+?
* Repeat character: +
* Numeric digit: \d
* Numeric digits: \d+?
* Newline: (\r\n|\r|\n)
* Newlines: (\r\n|\r|\n)+?
* Symbols: [^\s\w]+?
* Symbol: [^\s\w]
* Letters: [a-zA-Z]+?
* Letter: [a-zA-Z]
* Charset: []
* Charset (repetitions):[]+?
* Single whitespace char: \s
* Multiple whitespace chars: \s+?
If any of you can think of other very common Regex snippets (excluding ones using {}<>#| as I've yet to implement those), let me know.

MilesAhead:
Yes that road is littered with headaches, mines and nightmares. Implementing even a few basic features was proving to be more than a little tricky. Piggybacking off Regex is a breeze in comparison!
-Twinbee (May 26, 2015, 11:24 AM)
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I think it was OpenVMS Language Sensitive Editor had its own pattern matching scheme.  A percent sign matched any character is the only one I remember.  I wonder if they used regex internally or rolled their own.

Twinbee:
Well, I've got a beta, but stable and fairly polished feature-packed version complete. Love to hear some feedback from pro regex users and people who don't have a clue about how regex works. Even if you're not interested in the unique "unicode symbol" way of doing things, it's a pretty nice regex editor anyway.

Here's a couple of screenshots:





I now know more than I ever expected to know about Regex. Unlike most other find/replacers and regex helpers, "WildGem" (as it is now called) puts the focus on the text you're trying to search in (and the text you're trying to replace). In the end, I kept most of the core functionality that regex provides, but the most common uses are kept at the forefront (e.g: the simple symbol ✪ is the equivalent of ".*?" in regex language and there's a single simple symbol for the messy regex "(?:^|$|\n|\r\n)" which can find the start or end of any line).

And here it is - a single self-contained 53kb exe. No installation necessary, though it does require .NET 3.5 or later: http://www.skytopia.com/stuff/WildGem.exe

Ath:
I think I like it, especially for (regex) n00bs it'll be very helpful, as intended. :up:

A few remarks:

* Resizing the window isn't very polished
 
* The window is quite big, it may not fit correctly on smaller screen resolutions (and then the first item comes in)
* Tooltip time is rather short at it's default setting
* You might want to add the regex code inserted by a button into the tooltip, for the more technical/interested users

Twinbee:
Thanks and glad your initial impression was favourable!

Resizing the window isn't very polished
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It was either that, or no resizing. A workaround may be tricky. I mean, I could put it into a scrollable pane I guess...

The window is quite big, it may not fit correctly on smaller screen resolutions (and then the first item comes in)
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The width is 1185 pixels. I doubt many are using less than around 1300 pixels of width these days. Still, if someone on this forum is, I'll eat my hat, and try and condense it.

Tooltip time is rather short at it's default setting
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Ah, the developers of .NET would like to talk to you. Anyway, yes I agree entirely, and a (somewhat tricky) fix is forthcoming. In the mean time however, all the info from the tooltips are available in the main help section.

You might want to add the regex code inserted by a button into the tooltip, for the more technical/interested users
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Not a bad idea - I'll consider it.

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