Skip to main content

Improved Regex Code Completion and Bug Fixes

I've taken another step towards leveraging the new regex parser this weekend.  This time I've completely removed all dependencies on the old parser for the purposes of regex code completion.  So the syntax highlighter and code completion features are both running on the new parser.  This saves precious clock cycles and makes Regex Hero a little more efficient.  And then I've introduced full support for Unicode general categories and named blocks denoted by the \p{name} or \P{name} syntax.  So you'll get regex code completion for this as well.

In addition to this I've solved a few bugs:

  • The analyzer would get out of sync under certain situations, causing the list to be tabbed over needlessly.
  • Code completion would have issues when you try to navigate down the list and then back past the top result with the arrow keys.  Hitting down again wouldn't return focus to the list as it should.  I actually changed this behavior so the list will disappear if you do this.
  • Copying and pasting multiple lines of text within Regex Hero would create carriage returns which prevented the "End" button on the keyboard from advancing to the end of the line.
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