Skip to main content

Regex Hero's Debut

So last week I launched regexhero.com and submitted it to a few social bookmarking sites (Dotnetkicks.com happened to be the most effective). Since then I've had 368 visits to the site. That's a pretty strong start for a brand new website.

What Does The Tool Do?
Regex Hero will dynamically highlight regular expression matches as you type. The whole idea behind it is to save as much time as possible and make it as convenient as possible to work with regular expressions.

What's Special About It?
It's the first online .NET regular expression tester with instantaneous highlighting that I know of. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.) Microsoft Silverlight lends itself to this functionality perfectly. I essentially wrote it and got it online in 3 days. Since then I've made some tweaks and minor improvements, but nevertheless it was extremely easy to build and I have to thank Microsoft and their development tools for that.

The other thing I was surprised about is just how well .NET regular expressions are optimized. You can see for yourself if you use the benchmark feature in Regex Hero. On my computer it'll perform regular expression matching 500,000 times in one second, easy. The way .NET compiles and caches regular expression seems to really make it scream. That kind of performance helps with the instantaneous highlighting. I mean, you can create a huge target string and it'll still find and highlight the matches within milliseconds after every key press.

Will it Always be Free?
That's a tough question. Most likely, the online version you see now will always be free. But I may at some point create a desktop (WPF) version that I'll sell for cheap.

What's Coming Next?
I'm trying to figure out how to display the exception properly when you write an invalid regular expression. Essentially, since Silverlight excludes the necessary debugging assemblies, it won't provide the same exception detail I'm used to. Once I get that figured out you should see better error messages.

Then the next thing for me to do is add the ability to replace text with regular expressions. Other than that, I'm open to suggestions.
Labels:

Comments

  1. David SeruyangeMay 6, 2009 at 3:59 PM

    Hey, not that it's a work of art like Regex Hero (kudos) but there is another Silverlight Regular Expression tool - a variant of my tool nregex (http://nregex.com) called nregex9 at:
    http://nregex.com/nregex9/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steve WorthamMay 7, 2009 at 9:09 AM

    Thanks David.

    That's one I missed. I remember finding your site but I guess I missed your Silverlight version. Google searching > me.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Regex Hero for Windows 10 is Underway

Awhile back I began working on an HTML5 / JavaScript version of Regex Hero . However, it was a huge undertaking essentially requiring a complete rewrite of the entire application. I have not had enough time to dedicate to this lately. So I've begun again, this time rewriting Regex Hero to work in WPF. It'll be usable in Windows 10 and downloadable from the Microsoft Store. This is a much easier task that also has the advantage of running the .NET regex library from the application itself. This will allow for the same speedy experience of testing your regular expressions and getting instant feedback that Regex Hero users have always enjoyed. I expect the first release to be ready in Q4 of 2019.
2 comments
Read more

Optimizing Your Regular Expressions

Regular expressions will backtrack.  That's an unfortunate thing about them because backtracking can be slow.    And in certain (rare) cases the performance can become so awful that executing the regular expression against a relatively short string could take over a minute.  There's a good article about catastrophic backtracking over at regular-expressions.info . And today I created a video about all of this called  Regex Lesson 5: Optimization .  In the video I start with a very poorly written regular expression and make several improvements to it, using the benchmarking feature along the way.  By the end of the video I make the regular expression over 3 million times faster. In addition, today's update to Regex Hero provides a little message in the event that you encounter a regular expression that takes over 10 seconds to evaluate... And then last of all, I changed the benchmarking feature a bit.  In the past it would simply test your regular expression against
Post a Comment
Read more

Regex Analysis Bug Fixes

All of these updates relate to the analyzer, so if you're not a Regex Hero Professional user, then this won't affect you. I received a report of an analysis bug  related to character classes.  The regex analyzer wouldn't handle opening brackets inside a character class properly. It's one of the finer details of the regular expression syntax.  You wouldn't think that [[abc] would be valid, but it is.  You don't have to escape the opening bracket inside the character class.  So now the analyzer interprets this as it should. I've also fixed bugs around interpreting the \x00 (hex), \u0000 (unicode), and \k<group>  (backreference) expressions. P.S. The major updates I mentioned recently are still in the works.  So the price for Regex Hero Professional is still $20 for now.
Post a Comment
Read more