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Brendan Tompkins [MVP]

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Best Regular Expression Tool

I've tried a bunch of different tools for developing Regular Expressions, such as Rad Software's Regular Expression Designer, and Roy's The Regulator (which has the coolest icon), but I keep coming back to Eric Gunnerson's Regular Expression Workbench. The thing I like the most is Eric's “Add Item” menu bar which has sinppets of regex code. The other two may be great tools, but I can never seem to remember regex syntax, so the built in reference is cool.

UPDATE: Roy has pointed out that The Regulator does in fact have a snippets library, and it's even customizable... That being the case, I'll be using it for sure...

UPDATE: 3/9/04 Rad Software has added a regex library feature.

Anyone care to weigh in? Any other favorites?

-Brendan

Published Jan 15 2004, 11:48 AM by Brendan Tompkins

Comments

William Bartholomew said:

Expresso is a nice light weight tool
http://www12.brinkster.com/ultrapico/

# January 15, 2004 9:21 AM

Grant said:

My favorite "tool" is pretty old school: O'Reilly's book Mastering Regular Expressions.

Like you, I don't remember the regex syntax, so I find a good reference manual very handy. I haven't experimented much with the other tools, although maybe I will at the next regex opportunity.

# January 16, 2004 2:21 AM

Roy Osherove said:

Actually, The regulator mimics your favorite tool's add item menu. Just right click in the regex editing pane or right click on the snippets pane. Not only that, you can customize it to add your own items (it's an xml file in the application directory)

# January 16, 2004 5:26 AM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Roy... Thanks for the tip.. Perhaps you could provide a menu for this too? I poked around a bit and couldn't find it, never tried to right-click in the editing pane...

# January 16, 2004 5:28 AM

Ross Donald said:

Hi Brendan,
I have recently updated the Rad Software Regular Expression Designer and included a Language Reference that provides this type of feature.

# March 8, 2004 10:49 PM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Thanks for the info Ross! I just downloaded the update. Funny, a good regex tool is like a chainsaw, you rarely need one, but when you do it's essential... Next time I need a regex tool, I'll give Rad a try and report back here.

# March 9, 2004 1:03 AM

cnandusa said:

why i can't down't from
http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=c712f2df-b026-4d58-8961-4ee2729d7322

# January 22, 2005 11:57 PM

Brett Brewer said:

I have tried The Regulator and several other Regex programs and none of them seems as nice, stable, and easy to use as RegexBuddy. Check it out at:

http://www.regexbuddy.com/

It is unique in that it provides documentation on ALL the different flavors of Regular Expression Syntax and describes the differences when explaining them. It also allows you to build expressions for any of the mainstream environments such as PHP, PERL, .NET, ASP and most other flavors that you can imagine. It has by far the best help docs of any Regex program I've seen. In fact the docs alone are worth the price of the program. And no, I'm not affiliated with the program in any way. They don't offer a free trial anymore, but they used to and that's what I'm still using. It would be well worth the $29 price tag though.

# July 29, 2005 4:50 PM

Md. Sheriff said:

The bad thing (for me) about 'The Regulator' is that it is not bug-free (i'm refering to the latest version). I see exceptions coming up and forcing me to hit the 'Continue' button on many occasions, especially when i write in a non-capture syntax that starts as: "(?:" (without quotes, of course).

On a different account, I'm looking to see if there was a possibility (or a workaround) to achieve a regular expression that instructs to *exclude a word entity*.. Some thing like I want to match all HTML tags except the body tag (<body>). I do know the trick of using many single non charset but no use if the regex grows up to something complex. I will share the trick anyway, but that does mean I have the answer for what I'm looking for. As i said, it doesn't work when it becomes more complex.

<(?:[^b]?[^o]?[^d]?[^y]?)>

Anybody?

# May 26, 2006 1:59 PM

Md. Sheriff said:

Actually, I just found the solution :-)

I made a look around and wanted try what the heck is this negative lookahead.. but now, I say Thanks to it. here is the answer:

<(?!test).+?>

The logic is simple. You will say, <.+> to match any tag and with the negative lookahead in front of it, it makes the whole match fail (if the expression after "?!" succeeds).

Cool!! ah?

# May 26, 2006 2:32 PM

Gordon Mohr said:

I've written a tool for visually testing regexes in a browser. See:

http://regex.powertoy.org

Requires Java applet support -- it uses the Java regex engine for some of its animation/step-counting/syntax features beyond what Javascript regular expressions can do.

# October 26, 2006 5:04 PM

Ryan D. Hatch said:

RegEx Buddy saved my life. Greatly simplifies Regex & Works great! It generates code to paste right into many languages (.NET, Perl, Java, Python, etc.).

Ryan

# November 25, 2006 10:41 AM

Flip said:

Hi, I'm using this simple but efficient tool for checking and optimizing my regexps:

http://www.nettz.de/Service/regexp/

It's in german, but very easy to use.

...flip...

# December 25, 2006 10:31 AM

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About Brendan Tompkins

Brendan has been programming with .NET since the first public beta and is owner and operator of Port Technology Services, a consultancy company providing .NET application development services to the Maritime industry. In July, 2007, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET. He's also a proud co-founder of failed .COM startup Intrinsigo, and has had a hand in the failure of numerous other businesses. He currently runs CodeBetter.Com and Devlicio.us, and lives in Norfolk, Virgina with his wife Tiara and son Ian.