Skip to main content

Improved Auto-Saving

I knew there was room for improvement in the auto-saving feature. So I've made some changes that make the process faster and more efficient.

As I talked about last time, the synchronous saving method just had to go. So I made it asynchronous for the 3 main text boxes: regular expressions, replacement string, and the target string. Now that it's asynchronous it doesn't slow you down as you type, even if the target string is quite long. Now, isolated storage does have a limit of 1 MB. So to make good use of space I've imposed a 200,000 character saving limit on these 3 text boxes. Anything beyond that will be truncated.

The other change is related to the way I auto-save the settings (checkboxes, expanders, etc). Before I was doing something which was a little bit stupid, as it turns out. I was saving these settings into an XML file in isolated storage. And to do so I had added the System.XML.Linq assembly into Silverlight. Well I found that this was unnecessary as isolated storage has a very nice IsolatedStorageSettings class that's perfect for storing the little stuff. Now that I've switched to this method, I've removed the Linq assembly. And that has brought the size of Regex Hero from 223 KB bytes down to 163 KB -- a 60 KB savings. So these changes make it faster, more responsive, and better in every way.
Labels:

Comments

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