

Regular Expression Tool for Live Editing/Testing of RegExps made with jQuery - KrisJordan
http://gethifi.com/regexp/

======
thaumaturgy
Yeah, this one's going straight into my bookmarks file. I've never been able
to quite get my head around regular expressions -- they don't work the way I
think -- and yet I keep writing things that use them.

Thank you for posting this.

~~~
enobrev
I Highly recommend Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl.
<http://regex.info/>

------
KrisJordan
This is my first jQuery "app" (mini-app). After going through numerous
write/print debug loops writing Regular Expressions and being inspired by
Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts" this seemed like a fun tool to try
and write in JavaScript/jQuery. Appreciate any feedback.

Hope this Regular Expression tool is useful to other HN readers!

------
endergen
Great tool. I built something similar for an internal project at my startup
inspired by these two projects by Oliver Steele:

<http://osteele.com/tools/rework/>

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

~~~
KrisJordan
Wow, reAnimator is incredible. Great links.

~~~
endergen
Yes. I was very impressed by it. It made me finally go and dive deep into
learning regular expressions.

Oliver Steele's works/writings in general are all very interesting.

------
audionerd
Nice execution, and a clever marketing tool to reach developers who might
consider their CMS.

I've been really happy with Rubular for testing regexps targetting Ruby
(<http://rubular.com>).

~~~
petesalty
As a Ruby programmer I just can't live without Rubular. It's saved my ass
countless times.

------
mustpax
This is great stuff, definitely will be using it in the future.

It's worth noting, though, that this only runs the JavaScript style Regular
Expressions. Escape sequences and such things will vary to a degree between
different RegEx flavors. So keep that in mind if you use this tool to trouble
shoot any patterns for other languages with this tool.

------
tommy_mcclung
My last startup was a company called IMSafer <http://www.imsafer.com>. We
built an entire product around extensive and extremely complicated regex's to
find patterns of language that might indicate a sexual predator going after a
kid. The only tool that was useful to me was Regex Buddy
<http://www.regexbuddy.com>. Downside is that it doesn't run on the Mac, but
I'm telling you for creating and debugging regular expressions it is THE tool
to use. We had to optimize not only for matching, but for performance and as
you know if you write your regex's wrong, you can kill performance. Regex
Buddy has a debug mode that lets you see all the steps taken by the regex and
lets you find ways to optimize. Highly recommended.

------
yeahit
I use this - try example 4:

<http://en.gibney.org/calculator/>

------
mkyc
See also <http://regexpal.com/>

------
songism
i prefer <http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr/>

mouse over each part of your regular expression to see what it does

------
gojomo
Very pretty!

My own take on the same tool also uses jQuery, plus an invisible embedded Java
applet to (1) have access to Java's expanded regex syntax, and (2) enable
step-by-step animation of probes of the input text used to discover matches.
Try it at:

<http://regex.powertoy.org>

