Improved TextBoxes With Better Whitespace Support

Today's update is all about whitespace. I've created a new textbox control for Regex Hero which is now being used for the 4 main textboxes: Regular Expression, Replacement String, Target String, and Final String.

The new features are as follows:

Figure 1: Matching Line Feeds

Handles tab characters as it should. You can test this by entering \t in your regular expression and then hitting tab in your target string.
Matching carriage returns or line feeds are now visible with a half-width character block (as seen in the figure 1).
You may preserve the formatting of pasted text with the new "Preserve pasted formatting" option. This will retain the existing line endings of your source text as was suggested about a month ago.
Cycling through your matches with the up & down buttons is now much more responsive.

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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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