In my recent explorations into the world of writing “regular expressions” I came across a couple of different applications that are supposed to make it easier for you to write and test your expressions.
I didn’t have that much luck as the applications weren’t really as helpful as I had anticipated or really needed. It’s been awhile since I’ve come across something that’s made me feel completely ignorant, but regular expressions seems to be the winner lately.
The two apps I found are completely free and give you quite a bit of assistance and guidance for writing your “regular expression”, but I’m still looking for something a bit more natural English. Shoot, something that would let me even write some stuff that looked like SQL or VB would be a step up.
Here are the two apps I found though:
- Regulazy – this tool is very simple and is shown on the right in the image above. It’s more bare-bones, but still looks like it could get the job done if you know what you’re doing with the basics of regular expressions.
- Expresso – this was the first tool recommended to me and it’s fairly user-interface friendly. There seemed to be much more functionality available to the user, but it still didn’t give me the plain English encoding capability I was really looking for in the app.
- The Regex Coach – I found this after I’d already found the other two options, but didn’t download it and install it up to this point. It may have what you’re looking for so let me know if you give it a try and can compare it to the other two.