Skip to main content

Regex Hero Professional is Now Free

Regex Hero is now completely free! 

I've been working on this tool off and on for the past 8 years. I spent a lot of time making it very powerful and easy for developers to create efficient regular expressions. Throughout most of this time it's been a paid product. However, with the added pressure of other free tools out there getting better all the time, I've finally decided to make Regex Hero free as well. Enjoy!

Try Regex Hero at http://regexhero.net/tester/

Comments

  1. I love this tool and come to it as my default regex editor every time I need to work something through with a little help. I even bought a copy for a friend, it's that good!

    Have you consider open-sourcing it? Perhaps it might live for much longer if others contribute to keeping it alive.

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you Rik. And yes I have thought about open-sourcing it. However, a successful open-source project requires a very active maintainer. And without that the software could actually devolve. So it's something I'd have to balance very carefully should I ever do it. At the moment I'm still OK with dedicating time to it myself as needed.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think it would be great if you open sourced this. Even if you just approved PRs, the product could move forward and people could help you add features and such. Great tool, I'm a huge fan.

    ReplyDelete

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.

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

Installer for Desktop version of Regex Hero

As Firefox just dropped support for Silverlight I really needed a solution for Regex Hero. So I created an installer for it. It's still Silverlight, but by using the installer you can install it directly to your computer and never need to open it in a browser. If you visit regexhero.net/tester and don't have a browser that supports Silverlight (IE is the only one left), then you'll see download links for 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the installer. When you install it you'll see a link over on the right hand side that says "Activate Regex Hero". This process connects your desktop version of Regex Hero with your online account. So if you're a licensed user this is how you'll gain access to all of those licensed features. Note: Currently there will be a security warning when you try to run either one of these installers. I'm in the process of obtaining a code signing certificate and will update them as soon as possible. You may be wondering a