Some News and a New Feature

So I'll talk about the feature first. You may have noticed it. It's just a tall gray button along the side of the tool that you can click to collapse & expand the options menu. It can be useful when you're looking for a larger workspace. Plus it's fun to play with. I was motivated to add this because several weeks ago Steve Smith from RegexLib.com added Regex Hero to his site. I thought it looked a little cramped for space inside the page layout, so the ability to collapse the options menu has greatly improved this.

In other news, Silverlight 3 has been released. There are some cool features that Microsoft has added that will be soon making its way into Regex Hero. The most profound of which will be out-of-browser capabilities. This will mean that soon you'll have the choice to run Regex Hero from the site, or from your desktop.

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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.

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

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.

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