Hi all,
I know of The Regulator for testing regular expressions. And there's also RegExr for testing regular expressions as well. Does anyone know of other regex testing tools? Do any of these tools allow you to specify which RE engine you're testing against?
I changed this question to community wiki
According to Jeff's post:
RegexBuddy recommended by most, costs US$ 39.95
If you don't want to pay :
Other tools recommended by SO users include:
see the accepted answer to this question: Learning Regular Expressions
I use Expresso (www.ultrapico.com). It has a lot of nice features for the developer. The Regulator used to be my favorite, but it hasn't been updated in so long and I constantly ran into crashes with complicated RegExs.
I agree on RegExBuddy, but if you want free or when I'm working somewhere and not on my own system RegExr is a great online (Flash) tool that has lots of pre-built regex segments to work with and does real-time pattern matching for your testing.
If you are an Emacs user, the command re-builder lets you type an Emacs regex and shows on the fly the matching strings in the current buffer, with colors to mark groups. It's free as Emacs.
Here are some for the Mac: (Note: don't judge the tools by their websites)
I am still a big The Regulator fan.
There are some stability problems but these can be fixed by disableing the Intellisense. It gets mad with some expressions and typos in building an expression.
Would love it if Roy Osherove updated, but looks like he is busy with other things.
RegExr for testing with the Actionscript 3 (whichever standard that may be)
I like to use this online one: http://www.cuneytyilmaz.com/prog/jrx/ Of course, it'll be javascript regexp, but I've never yet done anything clever enough to notice the difference.
How much is your time worth? Pay the $40 and get RegexBuddy. I did, and I even upgraded from 2.x version to 3.x. It has paid for itself many times over.
I use the excellent and free Rad Software Regular Expression Designer.
If you just want to write a regular expression, have a little help with the syntax and test the RE's matching and replacing then this fairly light-footprint tool is ideal.
In the standard Python installation there is a "Tools/scripts" directory containing redemo.py.
This creates an interactive Tkinter window in which you can experiment with regexs.
In the past I preferred The Regex Coach for its simplistic layout, instantaneous highlighting and its price (free).
Every once in awhile though I run into an issue with it when trying to test .NET regular expressions. For that, it turns out, it's better to use a tool that actually utilizes the .NET regular expression engine. You can use the Regex Buddy for that. $40 isn't much to pay and Regex Buddy is one of the most powerful regex tools out there. Or you can use yet another free tool: Regex Hero.
Also this regex plugin can be useful for eclipse and idea users.