I'm happy to announce that we have released RegExr 0.3b. The most significant feature additions are the ability to save your patterns locally, and to share patterns on a searchable community database of regular expressions.
RegExr is a tool for learning, editing, testing, and sharing regular expressions (RegEx or RegExp for short). It is available online at RegExr.com, and as a desktop application for Mac OSX, Windows or Linux at regexr.com/desktop. Its features include:
- real time results: shows results as you type
- code hinting: roll over your expression to see info on specific elements
- detailed results: roll over a match to see details & view group info below
- built in regex guide: double click entries to insert them into your expression
- online & desktop: regexr.com or download the desktop version for Mac, Windows, or Linux
- save your expressions: My Saved expressions are saved locally
- share and rate expressions: search Community expressions and share your own
If you encounter any bugs or have any ideas for improving RegExr, please let us know in the comments below.
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Comments (28)
Looks nice, I love the community feature.
It needs an app icon though.
Posted by: Ryan Phelan at May 26, 2009 08:00 PMURL: http://www.rphelan.com
Hey Grant - very cool and very handy - dig the community feature as well.
I just happened to run across an interesting site the other day, regexlib.com - and they have a huge library of user submitted regular expressions and just so happens they have a webservice as well: http://regexlib.com/WebServices.asmx
Might be interesting to tie into that at some point.
See ya!
Posted by: Robert M. Hall at May 26, 2009 10:20 PMRob
URL: http://www.impossibilities.com/
Hey Rob - I've seen RegExLib, it's a great site. I didn't know it had a web service though. Definitely might make sense to tie into that in the next version.
Posted by: Grant Skinner at May 26, 2009 10:23 PMURL: http://gskinner.com/blog/
Really good tool. I've been looking for this since EditPad (editpadpro.com). It's a pity we don't have these powerful searching interfaces on most GUIs ;)
Posted by: Ian Liu at May 27, 2009 05:21 AMURL: http://ianliu.art.br
I've been using RegExr often lately and I'm really happy with it. It's the right tool for every AS3 developer who needs to experiment with regular expressions. Thanks!
Posted by: Rostislav at May 27, 2009 06:15 AMURL: http://www.asual.com
Great tool, thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Mark Parson at May 27, 2009 08:23 AMURL: http://delorum.com/#/portfolio
Fantastic Regex Tool. Thank you so much!
Posted by: Mark at May 27, 2009 08:58 AMURL:
Thanks! RegExr has been a valuable help to me several times already. Definetly part of my tool belt
Posted by: Jens Wegar at May 27, 2009 12:37 PMURL: http://playground.deju.nu
Nice ! Thanks you ! A little icon, for my Dock please ? :)
Posted by: myrddin at May 28, 2009 03:48 AMURL: http://myrddin.fr/blog
what was wrong with this one ?
Posted by: thibaud at May 29, 2009 01:33 AMhttp://ryanswanson.com/regexp
URL: http://www.thibaud.be
thibaud - I'm not sure I understand the question. It looks just fine. RegExr was released almost 7 months before Ryan's tool, and has a somewhat broader feature set, though his community features look a little more developed (this is something we'll be working on over time).
Posted by: Grant Skinner at May 29, 2009 02:14 PMURL: http://gskinner.com/blog/
Thanks to everyone for the feedback. We'll have a new version of the AIR app (probably w/o a new version number) with a nice new icon by Monday.
Posted by: Grant Skinner at May 29, 2009 02:16 PMURL: http://gskinner.com/blog/
Awesome! A couple feature requests:
1. Show the match and group captured content without having to hover the mouse.
For example,
2 capturing groups:
1 (span|p) - span
2 ([^"]*) - text-decoration:underline;font:bold
etc
2. stretchable right column
Posted by: judah at June 4, 2009 11:32 PMURL:
Hello, Grant! This is great tool. But can me explain something, please. For example I created some RegExp and text in text area is highlighted, it's ok. But if this match is big and end of matching is not in the text area (i.e. highlighted text not fit in text area), then highlighting not appears, so it's not possible to see any matches (. Is it bug or feature?
Posted by: Volgogradetzzz at June 11, 2009 01:30 AMURL:
This is a fantastic tool, I wish I had had it in college!
I had a long string I was testing out and it didn't finish the results. I was wondering, is there a limit on the string length in this version, or is the length limit from the regexp standard?
Also, when doing a ^(abc)|(def)|(ghi)|....' expression with a large number of groups, I would sometimes get something like this: "...group 29: xxx [[match]]; group 30 [NO MATCH]; ..... group 35: [[blank]] " (where the [[ ]] represent my commentary - is this a bug error or a side-effect of a really long ORed (|ed) sequence?
Thanks for your feedback.
Posted by: 22samurai at June 25, 2009 01:52 PMURL:
Grant,
Thanks so much for RegExr! I use it pretty much daily. Is there any way that in the next release, you could also include translation of regular expressions from language-to-language? Like perhaps a few lines of text at the bottom showing how the regular expression would be translated:
AS3 ^.*$
Perl: ^.*$
Java: ...
etc. This would be really nice, as my main crutch is that I learned regular expressions in AS3 rather than these other languages (like perl) which are very heavily influenced by regular expressions.
- TK
Posted by: TK at June 25, 2009 05:29 PMURL: http://blog.tkassembled.com
G8!,
It is a very nice tool and very useful.
I have one question.
The link is
I want to get the link name. I used the pattern
history|Img|file|link|animation|audio|a|img|script)[^>]*?(?>href|src)\s*?=\s*?[\"'](.*?)[\"'][^>]*?
But It returns the "sam" alone.
Is there any way to escape the single quote in link.
Thanks
Posted by: sam rajesh at July 3, 2009 03:05 AMSam Rajesh E
URL:
G8!,
It is a very nice tool and very useful.
I have one question.
The link is ""
I want to get the link name. I used the pattern
history|Img|file|link|animation|audio|a|img|script)[^>]*?(?>href|src)\s*?=\s*?[\"'](.*?)[\"'][^>]*?
But It returns the "sam" alone.
Is there any way to escape the single quote in link.
Thanks
Posted by: sam rajesh at July 3, 2009 03:07 AMSam Rajesh E
URL:
RegExr will not allow two forward slashes in the editor. It's the weirdest thing. Try entering the following pattern into the pattern text input: /[^/]?/
What happens is the first slash will disappear when entering the second or third slash. Really weird. What I'm trying to do is match text between two slashes, and this makes it kind of hard :)
Posted by: TK at July 14, 2009 11:36 AMURL: http://blog.tkassembled.com
TK - try escaping the forward slashes "\/"
Posted by: Grant Skinner at July 14, 2009 11:45 AMURL: http://gskinner.com/blog/
After over a year of near daily use this is still one of my top 5 favourite tools outside Eclipse! If only there were a way to mock E4X outside of Firebug too ;) Thanks for vetting your experiment into a serious application and sharing it with your fellow flashy regexers :)
Posted by: Jon Toland at August 12, 2009 08:49 AMURL: http://dnalot.com
Where I can found saved regexps (without launching RegExr app) ?
Posted by: ZaiS at October 30, 2009 01:50 PMURL: http://usemac.ru/blogs/zais
It is indeed a great learning and testing tool. It has some issues, though. For example:
1. Match: /^$/gm
Replace: foo
Text:
"line 1
line 2"
Posted by: MaxArt at November 15, 2009 09:03 AMIt produces:
"line 1
foofoo
line 2"
It should be foo, not foofoo.
2. It doesn't display correctly capturing groups with lookbehinds in the bottom box.
I'll report any other bugs if it may help you. For the rest, it's the best!
URL:
I am trying to find a RegEx to change all H tags' content to uppercase. Is it possible to pass $& to a function or perform .toUpperCase() on it?
i.e.,
change all some heading
to SOME HEADING
Any ideas? :)
Posted by: Og2t at November 24, 2009 08:06 AMURL: http://play.blog2t.net
Oh, had stripped HTML in my previous comment.
<h1 class="header">some heading</h1>
<h1 class="header">SOME HEADING</h1>
Thanks for the great tool Grant!
Posted by: Og2t at November 24, 2009 08:08 AMURL: http://play.blog2t.net
someone posted me this link but i cant see how the matched expression appears!!
i put the pattern in the top blank box and the string in the lower(broader) one then clicked match but there was no change in the appearance of the tool
does this mean there was no match or the tool is not meant to show the matched parts of the string???
Posted by: wacha at November 25, 2009 08:42 AMURL:
I am using 0.3.1b
Posted by: wacha at November 25, 2009 08:47 AMURL:
@Og2t, first you must be sure that your H1 tags don't have any child nodes, or else you have to make a more complex algorhythm (something like a html parser). Then do like this: match the opening tag, match the closing tag, and then get the text inside.
@wacha, just move the mouse over the matched text. A tooltip should appear.
Posted by: MaxArt at November 26, 2009 06:04 AMURL: