Regex Hero Blog

I discovered yesterday that in some cases the wrong text is selected when you're stepping through the matches with the Previous/Next buttons. Specifically it would happen when you're working with multiple lines of text and "CrLf marks a line ending" is checked. I just now fixed the problem so it won't happen again.

I made a few improvements to the application this weekend. I managed to find a more efficient way of doing a few things, eliminating unneeded steps during each regex matching cycle for real-time highlighting. In so doing I've sped it up slightly. I also found that I was calling the auto-save function a little too frequently so I tweaked the interval settings. That should reduce memory and hard drive usage when working with large target strings. And lastly I turned on GPU bitmap caching for several elements within the app. GPU acceleration features in Silverlight are still minimal, but this is one thing I'm able to do that actually has some small performance benefits.

When I released "Regex Hero for Desktop" several months ago I had named it the way I did because I was inspired by Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop . In fact Regex Hero shares a lot in common with Balsamiq the way we both started. I mean, obviously their app is a prototyping tool and mine is a regex tool. But Regex Hero is supported and maintained by just one man (me), as was Balsamiq back in the day. And they have a killer web app that thousands of people use, as do I. ;) However, I've come to realize that while I do admire Balsamiq and just about everything they do, my app is just not the same. You see, Regex Hero is actually very usable on the web. And when you buy it, you get an account and license key which then allows you to use all of the features all within the web version. You can then optionally install the desktop version and get all of those same features. So because the paid version can be run with the same feature sets inside or outside of the brow...

A week before Silverlight 4 came out I added some Javascript to the tester page to track what version of Silverlight everyone was running and feed it into Google Analytics. Silverlight 4 is still very new of course but I think it is interesting how many Regex Hero users have already upgraded. The adoption rate here is much higher than the stats from riastats.com would suggest (which of course spans a large variety of sites). Here's a screenshot from Google Analytics showing the breakdown of Silverlight versions on regexhero.net/tester/ during the past 2 weeks: "Silverlight 0" was my way of saying Silverlight is not installed. Regex Hero is still built on Silverlight 3. But I'm going to begin working on some major improvements to Regex Hero in the upcoming weeks. Silverlight 4 is going to allow me to add some awesome features that I'm looking forward to. And my plan at the moment is to launch the new Silverlight 4 version when the adoption rate surpa...

I began a new series of video lessons explaining the basics of regular expressions. I'm trying to be thorough in each lesson without talking about concepts that'll be learned in later lessons (a more difficult task than I expected). I have 3 so far, and I'll add to this list as I go: Introduction to Regular Expressions Regex Lesson 1: Characters Regex Lesson 2: Quantifiers Regex Lesson 3: Assertions

I discovered a couple of bugs with the code hinting this week. In some cases when you have constructs with a slash such as \d and \w at the beginning and end of an expression, then the code hinting for the parenthesis wouldn't work properly in the middle of the expression. If you type out the first few characters of an expression and then select it from the code hinting list, it wouldn't always put the caret in the right spot. Again this was most often seen when typing in the middle of the expression. I'm glad to say that both of these issues are now fixed.

Ah yes, the library. The library only has 13 regular expressions in it at the moment. So I've been working on making it more compelling to contribute. A couple weeks ago I added a tagging system and incorporated a faceted search engine for the library visible from the website. Only I have control over the tags for now as I'm still building out all of the interfaces. But this is one way to filter the regular expressions that I'll be relying on heavily as the list grows. Then just this weekend I refined the list inside the tester itself (soon I'll add tags and sorting to this as well): And I built out a voting mechanism: The voting mechanism will only appear for regular expressions out of the public library that are not your own. And it'll slide away after you vote. This should make it much more convenient to vote, and hopefully more compelling for developers to contribute as a result. Coming up next I'll have a points and badges system in pl...