Regular expressions are kind of a necessary evil of software development. They are extremely useful, but sometimes can get real confusing real quick. I, sad to say, have spent hours trying to find the one thing wrong with a regular expression set I was working on. Fortunate for us, there are a bunch of online resources and tools that can be very helpful in working with regular expressions. Let’s take a look at a couple of my favorites that are sure to help you out in your ventures.
Regular-Expressions.info: Authored by Jan Goyvaerts, who is Chief Software Designer for JGSoft makers of RegexBuddy and PowerGREP a great off line regular expression helper, Regular-Expressions.info is host to tutorials, tools, examples, books, and references that all together make one great resource for regular expressions. Regular-Expressions.info covers various programming languages including: Delphi, Java, JavaScript, .NET, Perl, PCRE, PHP, Python, Ruby.
RegExLib.com: At the time of writing, RegularExLib.com has 1592 expressions from 1051 contributors. Along with the contributions they also have an excellent community forums, and a cheat sheet that you can print out and reference.
REGex TESTER: Being able to test regular expressions with out running your code in debug mode is priceless, and can save a lot of development time. There are a lot of desktop tools that do a great job testing regular expressions, but REGex TESTER is an online tool. The online tool is somewhat limited, but can be a great start to testing your regular expressions.
I would like to do a second part of this article going over some desktop regular expression tools.
I’ve found the regex forum at devnetwork to be very helpful. I help out others there when I can.
I’m also putting together a regular expression reference at docforge. At this point I want to grow our list of useful examples.
I found this free program to be quite useful.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/regexcreator/