Edi Weitz's The Regex Coach "enables you to try out the behaviour of Perl's regular expression operators interactively and in 'real time', i.e. as soon as you make changes somewhere the results are instantly displayed. You can also query the regex engine about selected parts of your regular expression and watch how it parses your input. Of course, this application should also be useful to programmers using Perl-compatible regex toolkits like PCRE (which is used by projects like Python, Apache, and PHP) or CL-PPCRE."
From the feature list:
- It shows whether a regular expression matches a particular target string
- It can also show which parts of the target string correspond to captured register groups or to arbitrary parts of the regular expression
- It can "walk" through the target string one match at a time
- It can simulate Perl's split and s/// (substitution) operators
- It tries to describe the regular expression in plain English
- It can show a graphical representation of the regular expression's parse tree
- It can single-step through the matching process as performed by the regex engine
- Everything happens in "real time", i.e. as soon as you make a change somewhere in the application all other parts are instantly updated
Written in Common Lisp, it comes in Winows and Linux flavours. If you are looking for some pre-made regular expressions instead, RegExLib.com has a library of 272 so far.
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