Refining Regex Recommendations

100% Accuracy

Today I built an automated test so I can verify that the new regex recommendations engine is producing valid recommendations. In other words, I want to make sure that all of the recommended changes coming out of it do not affect the text that your regular expression matches. So I'm running the engine on about 2,000 regular expressions and target strings to verify its accuracy. I found a couple mistakes it was making and today's update takes care of that so we're up to 100% accuracy.

Other recommendations

I'm still working on making this feature better. And as I continue to expand on this functionality I want to also establish a concept of confidence with the recommendation engine. Thanks to today's test, I have 100% confidence in the recommendations that are in Regex Hero Professional today.

But there are other recommendations I want to create that I couldn't possibly have such confidence in. For instance, there's the issue of capturing groups vs non-capturing groups. It's a very common mistake to see a regular expression with capturing groups, and yet the captured values are never used for anything. Non-capturing groups are significantly faster and should be used instead in this scenario. But there's no way of me knowing how you're going to use the regular expression, so I can't recommend non-capturing groups with 100% confidence. So I need to create a new type of recommendation that appears differently in Regex Hero to cover scenarios like this. Look for this and more recommendations coming soon.