Any good regular expression creator software or online tools to create Regular expressions..

Question

Does anyone have any good link to a website or a good tool to create regular expressions rather than break your head to create one. The tool should be able to create regular expressions by simply selecting some sort of pattern text. For e.g If I want a phone number to be validated, I should be able to enter (000)-(111)-(1111) or 000-000-0000 or 000-0000000 and the tool shold generate regular expression automatically..

Answer 1

Expresso has a regex GUI builder.
But I'd recommend putting some time in and learning regular expressions - you'll be able to create expressions much faster than with a helper-builder-GUI

Edit: But it still won't read your mind. You need to build the regex piece by piece.. in that I want 3 digits then a - and so on... It can't guess that you need a phone number given a matching string

Answer 2

Creating regular expressions without having any clue about them doesn't work. But you can make use of software that helps you create them. I heard that regexbuddy should be quite good.

EDIT

Reasons why creating regexes from arbitrary strings cannot work can be found in the answer to this question

Answer 3

The human brain will create better and more readable regexes than any RegexBuddy. Regardless of how much a piece of software may help you develop faster regexes, there are several problems you'll have with these regexes:

1. They'll probably look pretty awful, and enforce the idea of regexes as write-only.
2. They'll probably be inefficient, and use weird/unnecessary solutions.
3. You won't understand what's going on in the regex, which means you'll be a cargo-cult programmer.

In the end, learning regular expressions will make you a better programmer - you'll be able to read other people's code and understand what it does, as well as being able to write your own regexes on the fly, which will usually be faster than stopping your coding workflow, turning to some external program, coming up with a list of test cases that should pass or fail, and then copying and pasting the resulting generated regex into your code without knowing what it does.

Answer 4

Good material :

Resources
microregex
This page describes the syntax of regular expressions in Perl.

Answer 5

RegexDesigner.NET is a very stripped down tool that I use when I don't have complex expressions to make. Less clutter makes simple regex testing fast.

Answer 6

I'm also a fan of RegexBuddy, but if you're working on a tight budget you can also use the open source (and free) utility called Kodos. It was originally designed for debugging and creating regular expressions for Python, but you can use it to validate any regular expression.

Of course, it will still rely on you actually knowing how to construct the regex, but at least you can use it to validate or test what you have.

Answer 7

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Regexlib yet

Answer 8

Here is a good online regex tool: www.gskinner.com/RegExr/

Answer 9

The Regex Coach has helped me a lot - it supports pretty much all the intricacies of regular expressions; you see in real time how your modifications operate on the string; also has a visual representation of the parse tree.

Answer 10

I like the highlighting and additional functionality in RegexPal. It's a free web tool that has a quick reference easily accessible. You'll even notice at the bottom that they recommend RegexBuddy for more power, but you'll still find RegexBuddy functionality in the web app.

Answer 11

If you're using Eclipse then Regex Util by Sergey Evdokimov is a pleasure. It sits right there in your IDE, so you won't lose it, and provides instant feedback on matches. Then it does all the escaping/unescaping for you as you copy and paste it back and forth into your code.

Answer 12

I use Rubular. It is not just for Ruby.