A New Tool Offers a Little Help with Regular Expressions
Regular expressions are a powerful programming tool, and the best way to solve many problems, but few people would call them a delight to use. Trying to tune a regex to match exactly the string you want can be a lengthy undertaking.
A new web-based tool aims to help with the process. Enter a text string into txt2re and its backend code (which seems to be antiquated PHP 3, judging by the file extension?) parses the string and proposes an array of regular expressions that match it and its various sub-elements. It recognizes certain string patterns, like state abbreviations and domain names.
After you’ve chosen the expression that suits your needs, txt2re automatically generates working code incorporating that expression, in your choice of Perl, PHP, Python, Javascript, C, Ruby, VBScript, and several other languages. The interface is not beautiful, and complex expressions still require hand-tweaking, but it’s a heck of a tool nonetheless.
