Regex Coach

development (This post is more than 2 years old.)

Tonight our user group talked about regular expressions, or regex. While I think I'm pretty good with them - I didn't have a good tool to write them. I typically just fired up a ColdFusion file and did my tests via the browser.

The speaker at tonight's meeting showed off The Regex Coach, a real handy, but Windows only, little tool to let you test regular expressions. Now I just need to find a Mac equivalent.

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Archived Comments

Comment 1 by Scott P posted on 11/8/2006 at 9:09 AM

Decent RegEx cheatsheet
http://regexlib.com/CheatSh...

Comment 2 by tanguyr posted on 11/8/2006 at 1:03 PM

try the QuickREx plugin for eclipse:

http://www.bastian-bergerho...

Comment 3 by test posted on 11/8/2006 at 2:45 PM

test

Comment 4 by Dan G. Switzer, II posted on 11/8/2006 at 7:39 PM

While it looks like QuickREx might have more options, I've been happy with RegEx Tester for Eclipse:

http://brosinski.com/regex/...

Comment 5 by Rob Wilkerson posted on 11/8/2006 at 8:57 PM

I use RegexTester as well and love it. There's also a widget available for Mac that I've used a few times and it seems to do the job as well.

Comment 6 by John Wilker posted on 11/8/2006 at 9:09 PM

complete regex n00b but I have used the mac widget and it helped with my first use of regex. I'm checking out all the other recommendations right now.

Comment 7 by Ben Nadel posted on 11/8/2006 at 9:44 PM

I use the RegEx coach and have to say that it ROCKS. I am sure I don't use it to its full potential (it has a lot of options), but it has gotten me through a lot of sticking points.

Comment 8 by Scott Stroz posted on 11/9/2006 at 1:40 AM

One thing to keep in mind is that CF uses a subset of the PERL regEx engine. So some RegEx that work in some of these tools may not work in CF

Comment 9 by Qasim Rasheed posted on 11/9/2006 at 5:38 AM

I have personally found the regulator to be an invaluable tool while writing regex.

http://sourceforge.net/proj...

Comment 10 by tof posted on 11/9/2006 at 11:48 AM

you often hear people saying (or read it on their blog) that what often makes the difference between 2 developers is how good they are at writing queries. I think it's pretty much the same with regexps. You will find hordes of programers out there that have no idea how to write one. admitedly, you write more queries than regexps on a day to day basis. at least I do :-)