Is there some good visual regular expression editor? [closed]

Answer 1

RegexBuddy is very useful.

Answer 2

This is a nice online regex editor/tester: http://myregexp.com/

Answer 3

you can try PCREck, a multi-dialect regular expression editor, it is also open source if you care about that.

Answer 4

There is Regexper - An Online Tool For Beautiful JavaScript Regexp Visualizations - which recently came out.

Regexper is a tool for visualizing JavaScript regular expressions online. The tool can be used as a teaching tool or simply as a tool to follow the logic of your JavaScript regex to get a better understanding of it. It might especially be useful when you have to write complex regular expressions.

Answer 5

I think you will find www.debuggex.com very valuable. Some advantages of debuggex are:

• Feedback is in real-time, so you can understand what's happening faster
• The ability to answer the question "Why does/doesn't it match here?" for any position in your text.
• Very heavy on the visuals, it was a core design decision behind it's creation

At the time of writing, it only supports Javascript. However, more languages are planned for the future.

Answer 6

What is "good" depends on what is most useful to you. For me, though, these are the key features for a good regex editor (besides the ability to test and create regular expressions, of course, which is a prerequisite to be called a "regex editor" :-) :

1. Displays matches hierarchically with captured groups.
2. Explains/analyzes an entered regex in plain English, showing a hierarchical tree.
3. Translates your regex into code for a language of your choice.

RegexBuddy, as @Max mentioned, does all these but there is also a free alternative, Expresso that also does them very well. These two utilities are the only ones I have found with the crucial ability to explain a regex. Here is an example from RegexBuddy:

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