The Permalink Feature

I made several changes yesterday. You'll notice that I've changed the layout a bit, moving "Generate .NET Code", "Benchmark", and now "Permalink" under Tools.

Permalink is new. I've seen it plenty of times in blogs and forums and such. But the idea with Regex Hero is that it'll actually save the state of Regex Hero into a database, generate a GUID, and then return a permanent link.

There's an example of that here:
http://regexhero.net/tester/?id=8dc11baa-c96c-4362-9469-eecd431ebfb4

The motivation for this comes from all the questions about writing regular expressions I see all the time. These questions are asked all over the place but lately it's looking like StackOverflow is the most popular place to ask. This permalink feature could prove useful to the person asking the question, or even the person answering it. That way it becomes that much easier to see the regular expression in question and what regex options are required to make it work.

Comments

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.

Regex Hero Blog

Search This Blog