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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
Thank you for posting this.