Regex Buddy Free

[Nakia Schaf]

RegexBuddyis your perfect companion for working with regular expressions. Easily create regular expressions that match exactly what you want. Clearly understand complex regexes written by others. Quickly test any regex on sample strings and files, preventing mistakes on actual data. Debug without guesswork by stepping through the actual matching process. Use the regex with source code snippets automatically adjusted to the particulars of your programming language. Collect and document libraries of regular expressions for future reuse. GREP (search-and-replace) through files and folders. Integrate RegexBuddy with your favorite searching and editing tools for instant access.

I bought RegexBuddy 5 years ago. I think there are less than 30 working days than since, that I did not use it. I got all the free updates/bugfixes over the years and finally asked myself: WHY? I was more than willing to pay for updates after two years or so but it was always free. This is really fair and best practice for consumer satisfaction.

One of my developers has started using RegexBuddy for help in interpreting legacy code, which is a usage I fully understand and support. What concerns me is using a regex tool for writing new code. I have actually discouraged its use for new code in my team. Two quotes come to mind:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian Kernighan

Poor programming is rarely the fault of the tool. It is the fault of the developer not understanding the tool. To me, this is like saying a carpenter should not own a screwdriver because he might use a screw where a nail would have been more appropriate.

Regular expressions are just one of the many tools available to you. I don't generally agree with the oft-cited Zawinski quote, as with any technology or technique, there are both good and bad ways to apply them.

Personally, I see things like RegexBuddy and the free Regex Coach primarily as learning tools. There are certainly times when they can be helpful to debug or understand existing regexes, but generally speaking, if you've written your regex using a tool, then it's going to be very hard to maintain it.

As a Perl programmer, I'm very familiar with both good and bad regular expressions, and have been using even complicated ones in production code successfully for many years. Here are a few of the guidelines I like to stick to that have been gathered from various places:

You should encourage the use of tools that make your developers more efficient. Having said that, it is important to make sure they're using the right tool for the job. You'll need to educate all of your team members on when it is appropriate to use a regular expression, and when (lessmore) powerful methods are called for. Finally, any regular expression (IMHO) should be thoroughly commented to ensure that the next generation of developers can maintain it.

Yes, they can become messy and obscure, exactly as any other piece of code somebody may write but they have an advantage over code: they represent the set of strings one is interested to in a formally specified way (at least by your language if there are extensions). Understanding which set of strings is accepted by a piece of code will require "reverse engineering" the code.

On using a tool to understand a regex (or write a new one) I think it's perfectly fine! If somebody wrote it with the tool, somebody else could understand it with a tool! Actually, if you are worried about this, I would see tools like RegexBuddy your best insurance that the code will not be unmaintainable just because of the regex's

Regular expressions are a great tool for a lot of text handling problems. If you have someone on your team who is writing regexes that the rest of the team don't understand, why not get them to teach the rest of you how they are working? Rather than a threat, you could be seeing this as an opportunity. That way you wouldn't have to feel threatened by the unknown and you'll have another very valuable tool in your arsenal.

Zawinski's comments, though entertainingly glib, are fundamentally a display of ignorance and writing Regular Expressions is not the whole of coding so I wouldn't worry about those quotes. Nobody ever got the whole of an argument into a one-liner anyways.

If you came across a Regular Expression that was too complicated to understand even with comments, then probably a regex wasn't a good solution for that particular problem, but that doesn't mean they have no use. I'd be willing to bet that if you've deliberately avoided them, there will be places in your codebase where you have many lines of code and a single, simple, Regex would have done the same job.

Regexbuddy is a useful shortcut, to make sure that the regular expressions you are writing do what you expect- it certainly makes life easier, but it's the matter of using them at all that is what seems important to me about your question.

Having said all that, I think any developer worth his salt should be reasonably proficient in regular expression writing and reading. I've been using regular expressions for years and have never encountered a time where I needed to write or read one that was terrifically complex. But a moderately sized one may be the most elegant and concise way to do a validation or match, and regexps should not be shied away from only because an inexperienced developer may not be able to read it -- better to educate that developer.

I prefer not to use regex tools. If I can't write it by hand, then it means the output of the tool is something I don't understand and thus can't maintain. I'd much rather spend the time reading up on some regex feature than learning the regex tool. I don't understand the attitude of many programmers that regexes are a black art to be avoided/insulated from. It's just another programming language to be learned.

It's entirely possible that a regex tool would save me some time implementing regex features that I do know, but I doubt it... I can type pretty fast, and if you understand the syntax well (using a text editor where regexes are idiomatic really helps -- I use gVim), most regexes really aren't that complex. I think you're nearly always better served by learning a technology better rather than learning a crutch, unless the tool is something where you can put in simple info and get out a lot of boilerplate code.

Well, it sounds like the cure for that is for some smart person to introduce a regex tool that annotates itself as it matches. That would suggest that using a tool is not as much the issue as whether there is a big gap between what the tool understands and what the programmer understands.

I see the issue, though. You probably want to discourage people from building more complex regular expression than they can parse. I think standards can address this, by always requiring expanded REs and check that the annotation is proper.

I generally don't subscribe to the UNIX religion, but there is one area where I am an unabashed convert: regular expressions. Yeah, the syntax is a little scary, but for processing strings, nothing is more effective. The RegEx is the power drill of the programmer's toolkit: not appropriate for every job, but the go-to tool for a lot of common jobs. And what could be more common than the humble string, particularly in this day and age of HTML, XML, SOAP, and other plain text formats? Most modern development languages have complete Regular Expression support-- even in the IDE for things like search and replace.Over the last four years I've experimented with a number of commercial, freeware, and even homegrown RegEx tools. In the .NET era, I started with Expresso, and I recently found out about Regulator, which is hands down the most impressive free RegEx tool I've encountered to date. But that was before I met my new best friend, RegexBuddy:I belatedly realized after I created this screenshot I may have accidentally picked the complicated "run away screaming" example. Great for me as an intermediate regex user, but not so great for introducing people to the miracle of RegEx. So let me apologize by way of explanation: this regex captures all valid HTML 4.0 tags. It also exploits a very powerful feature called named captures-- see the ? and ? highlighted in that tannish-brown? In .NET you can refer to those matches with a very simple, logical syntax:Dim mc As MatchCollection = reg.Matches(strHTML)Dim m As MatchFor Each m In mcm.Groups("element").ToStringm.Groups("attr").ToStringNextThe one unique, killer feature that RegexBuddy has is super fast, real-time highlighting of all possible matches as you type the regular expression. That has always been my complaint about regex composition: it's difficult to tell beforehand what the effect of your regex will be until you "run" it and browse all the matches. With RegexBuddy, you don't have to-- just type and watch. No running required. But that's not the only great feature: the plain text regex decomposition and the pre-built regex library are also best of breed. Needless to say, highly recommended, and currently my preferred tool. It's not free, but TANSTAAFL.Once you come to grips with the basics of regular expressions, you'll want a handy cheat sheet of the syntax. The best one I've found is VisiBone's JavaScript foldout. There's also an online version. All the VisiBone stuff is super cool, and brings back warm memories of those incredible Beagle Brothers posters I had for the Apple //. However, the information density does get a little ridiculous on the VisiBone cards, so I'd go with the foldouts or the wall charts, unless you enjoy squinting a lot. If you just can't get enough, and you want to learn about the thrilling history of RegEx and understand how they work under the hood (try to envison me stifling a yawn at this point) there's also the O'Reilly book.You may not even need to know the syntax if you can drop prebuilt regexes into your code. Why build what you can steal? There are a number of sites with growing prebuilt repositories of regular expressions: -expressions.info/ (available as a web service!)Drunk with the power and possibility of regular expressions, you might start thinking regular expressions can do.. well, just about anything. I've been there, and let me warn you up front: they can't do recursion-- or reverse matching from the rear of a string-- without some mighty ugly hacks. This rules out a lot of potential uses, or at least relegates regexps to a helper role. And that's a good thing. Despite their undeniable power, regexps aren't a procedural programming language. In limited string processing roles, they're perfect. That's what they were designed to do. But can you imagine writing an entire application with that kind of crazy, nigh-indecipherable syntax Perl?

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