Regular Expression Designer: Free Program to Help you Build Regular Expressions

[mouser]

Rad Software Regular Expression Designer is a free download that helps programmers learn, develop and test Regular Expressions. It is an interactive Windows application that is designed to be simple and easy to use.

Features
The Regex match results are listed in a tree with levels for Matches, Groups and Captures. Clicking on a Match, Group or Capture will highlight it in the Input text window
Regex.Replace is supported and the results of the replace are listed in a separate window.
The Language Element window is an embedded reference that gets you up to speed quickly.

http://www.radsoftware.com.au/regexdesigner/

from http://shellcity.net/

[Veign]

Nice.  Regular Expression are on my hate-to-do list when it comes to development.

[f0dder]

Solve a problem using regular expressions and suddenly you have two problems

That said, they can be pretty useful, as long as you're not trying to do "real" parsing using regex. I've usually been using The Regulator for regex testing, but it's somewhat quirky - might give this tool a try.

[AbteriX]

Thanks for the link    such things are helpfull every time

[TPReal]

Very nice program! Sometimes I need to parse automatically some web page, and it's a bit frustrating when you compose a huge regexp, test it, and it simply does not work at all. Probably because of a tiny mistake somewhere in the middle.

I've just tested RegEx Designer: I pasted the whole page source into the text field, and built the expression step by step, checking what parts of the source were matched after each step. It was much less pain than without the program!

Also, a rather nice and intuitive GUI, in my opinion. I will definitely use it from time to time. Thanks!

[Ralf Maximus]

Oooh, cool.  I am grabbing this.

[nontroppo]

I always liked regex coach:

http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/

But this looks good too, thanks mouser! 

[ewemoa]

I don't know how useful the following would be for practical regular expression work, but FWIW:

http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/

[kartal]

There is Kiki as well


http://code.google.com/p/kiki-re/

[ewemoa]

Didn't find any screenshots...

So, here's one:

[widgewunner]

I was going to download and try it until I saw this...

.NET Framework 1.1/2.0 Required

I've managed to keep my box free of .NET up until now. Although I am aware that the .NET regex engine is quite powerful after reading about it in Mastering Regular Expressions (its one of the only engines that allows for variable length look-behind). I'd give it a try, but my regex tool of choice is regexbuddy, which does everything I need (except recursive expressions).

[mwb1100]

I was going to download and try it until I saw this...

.NET Framework 1.1/2.0 Required

I've managed to keep my box free of .NET up until now...

To each his own, but I don't understand this aversion to .NET - it's been around for about 8 years now and as far as I know it hasn't been the cause of any security holes or other major problems.

It is a fair sized download, but that only happens once (or once every major upgrade) and it's smaller than service pack. I can also understand the irritation of having to wait for a .NET application to start up; but if the application does what I want, it might be worth the wait. On the other hand if the application isn't good enough to justify the startup delay then I don't use it.

However, to be 'against' the .NET framework itself doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's just a tool.  I know there are people who have a similar attitude toward Java programs, but if the program looks and acts like a native program (and there are Java programs that do), performs well and does what I want, why would I refuse it simply because it's Java?

[f0dder]

And .NET programs don't really take that long to start, anyway. Paint.NET, for instance, is around 1 second on my machine - I find that acceptable. And C# is a pretty darn nice programming language . I understand aversion to Java better, but only because most Java UIs look like crap and are pretty darn sluggish... the platform itself offer acceptable performance for a lot of stuff, really

[Eóin]

Not just C#, been reading a book on F# these days and it also seems really nice.

[kartal]

Does anyone know any regex tester that can work on the focused window content? So basically I would type my regex in the regexpap, and  the app would look for a match that is under the regex app window, like Firefox, Word etc.

[ewemoa]

Does anyone know any regex tester that can work on the focused window content? So basically I would type my regex in the regexpap, and  the app would look for a match that is under the regex app window, like Firefox, Word etc.

Don't know of any such tool -- sounds like an interesting idea.

<dreaming>
I guess for each application type (and perhaps by type of window), specifically what you want your regular expressions to work on may vary.

For Firefox, if your current tab happened to be a web page, I presume you'd want the regular expression to apply to the underlying HTML (so -- would this be what was retrieved or some representation of the current DOM?).  What if I'm looking at an FTP directory listing though...perhaps whatever you can get via "View Page Source"?

For something like Notepad, it seems like it might be straight-forward.

One might even get OCR involved for certain types of situations...e.g. PDFs that are basically a series of images of text.

May be a plug-in system for such a tool could provide a means for people to contribute handling for specific situations...
</dreaming>

Anyway...hope there is something like this already   (May be some of the text expansion tools are in a good position to provide this type of functionality?  Or perhaps some AHK script?)