Regular expression can be used to identify strings of text. They are written in a formal language that looks hard to understand on first glance but follows strict rules. Most users associated regular expressions with programming languages and while this is surely a dominant area regular expressions are supported in text editors and other tools. One of the most popular is probably grep in the Linux operating system.
The Regex Coach is an excellent software program to learn regular expressions as it displays realtime results in its interface. The interface itself is divided into two display panes that contain the regular expression and the target strings. Below are tabs and buttons that provide additional functionality.
A user who wants to test a regular expression would enter it in the first column and add a target string in the second. The program automatically highlights the area of the target string that is matched by the regular expression. Any modification to the regular expression will automatically be visualized in the target string pane.
Invalid entries are displayed automatically as a status message. The program will for instance notify the user if a bracket has not been closed which would make the expression invalid.
The Regex Coach is a learning by doing aid for learning or verifying regular expressions. There is still need for a documentation on regular expressions like this one.
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Speaking of Perl saving the day, you can create a regular expression with 9 lines of Perl code.
#!/usr/bin/perl
while () {
chomp;
if (/YOUR_REGULAR_EXPRESSION_GOES_HERE/) {
print “Matched: |$`$’|\n”;
} else {
print “No match: |$_|\n”;
}
}
There is another similar one . You can find it here
http://gskinner.com/RegExr/
This has both an online and desktop version. I use this.
Mohamed Shafi: Thanks. This one works a little better for someone with very little regex experience.