Good Regular Expression Fiddle

David A Gray

I just found a very nice regular expression fiddle form at [Online regex tester and debugger: PHP, PCRE, Python, Golang and JavaScript](https://regex101.com/r/vY3pY3/1)

David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting

Mike Hankey

I have used Expresso[^] for a long time and really like it. Granted I don't use regex a lot, out of sheer terror but when I do I use Expresso. :)

Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film. Steven Wright

David A Gray

Thank you for reminding me about Expresso. Though I've seen it before, I've never put forth the effort to install it. A quick look at the screen shot on his home page tells me right away why you like it; it's a full-service regular expression editor that looks like it would meet most needs of anyone whose use of regular expressions is infrequent, and would be a nice productivity tool for experienced regular expression authors. Working with Perl for the last 20 years has required becoming fairly comfortable reading and writing regular expressions. Although I write less Perl today than I did fifteen years ago, my general purpose text editor, UltraEdit, has supported Perl/AWK style usage of regular expressions in its find and replace dialog boxes for at least the last nine years, and I use them regularly. Hence, between the two, I can usually cobble together a usable expression pretty quickly. I found this online fiddle form when I went in search of a regular expression idiom that I have almost never used, the "not followed by" idiom. Incidentally, I needed it in a regular expression to search for a particular type of syntax error in a manually edited Visual C++ project configuration file. (I know, I have no business editing those .vcxproj files by hand, but I've become somewhat obsessed lately with fully parameterizing my build configurations, which can be done much more quickly by editing the configuration directly than by clicking around in the Visual Studio property page editor. While I will probably download Expresso for use in my home office, there remains, nevertheless, a place for online fiddle forms when I must use a computer that doesn't belong to me, meaning that I must get permission to install tools of my choosing on it. That goes double when I need to borrow a clients's computer for only a few minutes to help them solve a problem.

David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting

David A Gray

Mike Hankey wrote:

Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film.

I just noticed the quote in your sig, and told my wife. She howled. :-D

David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting

Mike Hankey

Glad she liked it. I understand about the regex online thing, just didn't know if you knew about Expresso.

Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film. Steven Wright

David A Gray

I vaguely recall reading about Expresso several years ago, when I was working on one of those computers onto which I was forbidden to install most tools, even of the FOSS variety.

David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting

inch

Not seen that before. My fave is RegExr: Learn, Build, & Test RegEx[^]

David A Gray

There are probably more RegExp fiddle forms than there are JSFiddle, JSONFiddle, and all the rest combined. What appealed to me about this one was the clear feedback about text entered into the test text box.

David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting